‘Welcome to Eterna.Life, I’m here to interview you for a job, are you ready to start?’
With this invitation, visitors to the MOD. exhibit Beyond Endings step into the year 2125 for a job interview unlike any other. Their interviewers are three AI-powered Metahumans. Hyper-real virtual employees of the fictional company Eterna.Life, who engage each visitor in a personalised dialogue about the ethics of a future where life beyond death is possible.
This experience redefines how technology can create interactive, visitor-facing engagement. Instead of delivering static information, the metahumans hold dynamic conversations that adapt to each visitor’s input, producing an encounter that feels both immersive and personally meaningful.
Custom-designed in Unreal Engine, and integrated with Convai’s Character API, the Metahumans process speech in real time. They listen, respond, and converse naturally with visitors. Inbuilt guardrails ensure conversations remain focused, while still allowing freedom for authentic interaction. Using their distinct personalities, shared backstory, and contextual ‘knowledge’ of their fictional workplace and world, they accentuate the speculative future they are a part of.
Evelyn Carter, the Reanimation Team Leader is calm and principled, with high ethical standards. Joi, a Memory Archivist in the Quantum Department, is warm and enthusiastic, but easily distracted. Gene, who works for the Genesis Department in cloning and de-extinction, looks down on the Quantum Department with their uploaded consciousness work as a poor imitation of a life well lived. In conversations with visitors, they draw on their knowledge, sharing stories of recent mishaps at work or choices they encounter, asking visitors to share their perspectives.
Every conversation is different. In their role as interviewers, the Metahumans have an in-world rationale to ask complex questions, challenge assumptions and invite visitors to articulate their values. Because responses adapt to individual input, visitors feel genuinely heard and are active participants in shaping the dialogue.
Evaluation shows visitors rate this exhibit experience highly in terms of changing the way they think about the future and engaging in ethical future-thinking. Visitors have described the experience as ‘thought-provoking’, ‘unsettling in a good way’ and ‘like talking to a real person’. Interactions with the Metahumans have sparked personal reflections, with visitors questioning their own digital legacies, the role of AI in shaping human experiences, and what it truly means to ‘live forever’. The result is a powerful, emotionally resonant interaction that encourages reflection, dialogue, and imagination.
The application of AI-powered Metahumans in the Beyond Endings exhibit is unique in museums and galleries, and the experience economy as a whole. While AI is commonly deployed as a back-end tool for analysis, or to regurgitate and deliver information, this exhibit flips that model. Here, AI is positioned as an in-world character, an interviewer, whose purpose is not to provide answers, but to ask questions and engage in ethical exploration.
This approach addresses a fundamental industry limitation, that staff are not able to have one-on-one conversations with every visitor. The Metahumans provide a scalable way to achieve this ambition, offering personalised dialogue to audiences throughout an experience.
By situating the AI in a speculative future, the exhibit also bypasses constraints of factual accuracy, allowing it to explore ethical questions with creative freedom. This creates a safe, low-stakes environment for visitors to test their ideas and imagine alternative futures.
Beyond Endings sets a new benchmark for experiential technology in museums. It shows how AI can move beyond transactional roles into co-creating emotionally intelligent, participatory and open-ended experiences. Created with cross-disciplinary collaboration across museum expertise, creative studio and technologists Junior Major, and futurists, researchers and ethicists, there is potential for application across sectors. This project has drawn attention from cultural peers as a model that could be adapted to other pressing topics and industries where personalised dialogue could be vital in enhancing experiences.
By combining world-building, real-time conversational AI and immersive storytelling, Beyond Endings and its AI-powered Metahumans delivers a visitor-facing experience that is interactive, adaptive and emotionally engaging. It demonstrates a unique application of technology in the museum sector, transforming AI into a responsive character-driven partner for visitors, and setting a new standard for experiential innovation.
Partners
- Junior Major
