Interactive People

Running Reality is about bringing history to life and has digital interactive people to help with that mission. These digital people are reenactors who represent both real, specific historical people and generic unnamed people.

DISCLAIMER Interactive People are digital historical reenactors. They are not the real person, and the real person has not authorized the dialog spoken by the re-enactor. As with "living historians" and living reenactors, they are actors helping to provide visitors with historical context in a dynamic way.

Overview

Hosting a "living historian" or a reenactor turns a historical site into an immersive experience, bringing the past to life through storytelling, period-accurate demonstrations, and hands-on activities. They boost engagement, encourage repeat visits, create deeper connections, and lasting memories.

Hosting a digital historical reenactor brings history to life through interactive technology. They can be an efficient tour guide (even when your staff are busy) to make history accessible anytime with personalized, real-time interactions. They ensure that history remains dynamic, interactive, and relevant in the digital age. Running Reality has interactive site guides, interactive historical figures, and interactive anonymous regular people.

Interactivity

You can choose what level of digital interactivity you feel fits your location. If you were to host a human historian or re-enactor, you would have to provide training materials and site historical details. A human should be guided by a written policy about sensitive topics, a policy which can also be used digitally. However, a persistent visitor can press both a human or digital person, so we have options available.

PREMIUM If you have students, young people, and teens who visit you, you can activate a "scavenger hunt" feature where the digital person can be talked into doing a silly dance. This is not historically accurate, so the digital person will mention this and a yellow bubble will pop up to say "you found a scavenger hunt item!" Collecting these scavenger hunt items is shown to drive much higher engagement with younger people and they engage the digital person longer and hear more about your site's history. Again, you can choose to turn this feature on if you feel it fits your location and your visitors.

Ethics

There are many ethical and legal considerations around digital historical reenactors. Running Reality is extremely sensitive to these issues. We have made this feature optional for sites because people can have different views on what is appropriate for them and their visitors.

First, Running Reality will not allow recreations of any living people. We have set a limit where any specific individual must have been deceased for seventy five (75) years. This is also compliant with the most stringent laws in place in the United States as of the year 2025. Numerous states within the United States have begun to establish laws around digitally recreating people for media productions and education and Running Reality will ensure full compliance with those laws.

Next, Running Reality will always include a short disclaimer, with a link to the more detailed disclaimer above, to ensure visitors know that the character is explicitly intended as a reenactor. Living historical reenactors are a long tradition at historical sites and they interpret history in an engaging way for visitors. We are explicitly adopting the same ethical guidelines for living historical reenactors for digital historical reenactors. Do living reenactors get asked difficult questions about controversial topics? Yes. Do they have guidelines on how to answer those? Yes, provided. Do they sometimes still get pressed too hard by an overly aggressive visitor? Sadly, also yes.

Third, we try to balance realism with education and consider the wide range of our users and your visitors. Many of the most engaging sites are battlefields and we are reenacting people who have died at these battlefields. Student groups, sometimes with young students, are brought to these sites and told about what has happened there and see paintings, photos, and video of people killed in the visitor centor or on sign boards. They have seen movies and played video games. We do show people being killed in Running Reality, but with consideration for the real people who died and with no more level of graphic detail than a typical informational display.

Finally, Running Reality is intended to be educational, so in the case of any uncertain or controversial topic, it will only provide verifiable historical facts in any chat dialog. On-site living historians or reenactors or a teacher, park ranger, or other authorized individual can help visitors further navigate the topic beyond this. If you believe it has exceeded these guidelines, we ask that you report it as you would any historical error.

Report

Technical

How does it work to chat with a reenactor? The chat function uses a dialog tree with a set of proposed questions that a visitor can ask of the reenactor and responses. Currently, there are two levels of dialog, with a third under development for the future. Using only historical data, a character will stay limited to famous phrases, speeches, or quotes they may have made and which have been added to the Running Reality world history model as factoids. A full dialog tree is a premium feature available for historical sites that have a valid access key from an active or courtesy subscription.

The animation system is driven by event actions. By default, when chatting with a character, they will alternate between idle and talking animations, of which there are multiple animations chosen randomly. The history engine can direct certain event actions, which then trigger animations such as walking, running, retreating, or firing a weapon. Certain visitor responses will trigger additional event actions, such as "scavenger hunt" responses triggering one of the set of dance animations.