"From remembering to shaping": Narrating Shared Experiences by Co-Designing Cultural Heritage Artifacts in Collaborative VR
Yushang Yang, Fanxu Meng, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, RAY LC
TLDR
This paper explores how people collaboratively co-design cultural heritage artifacts in VR using GenAI, overcoming its limitations to narrate shared experiences.
Key contributions
- Designed a collaborative VR workflow for two people to co-design cultural heritage artifacts using GenAI.
- Observed participants merging prompts and using spatial operations to negotiate perspectives and express experiences.
- Found users creatively re-purposed unsatisfactory GenAI outputs as inspiration for shared narratives.
Why it matters
This work is significant for understanding how collaborative VR and GenAI can facilitate the sharing of collective cultural heritage memories. It highlights user strategies for overcoming AI limitations, fostering richer, more personalized narratives despite potential homogenizing effects.
Original Abstract
The ways people remember and recall places reveal an invisible aspect of cultural heritage (CH), reflecting how individuals and communities relate to these places. Heritage is communal, emerging through collaboratively constructed narratives rather than individual records. To probe how people may share collective memories, we designed an immersive two-person workflow for collaboratively co-designing 3D artifacts and environments in virtual heritage locations, using Generative AI (GenAI) to instantiate these intangible memories. Observations of the co-creation process revealed that participants merged prompts and model placements when negotiating different perspectives. They used spatial operations to compose scenes, and also to express personal and embodied experiences of CH. When GenAI failed to meet their needs, participants engaged in creative appropriation, re-purposing unsatisfactory generated objects as sources of design inspiration to further shared narratives. While GenAI may have a homogenizing effect on CH expression, this work shows how people may overcome limitations in immersive collaborative workflows.
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