"From remembering to shaping": Narrating Shared Experiences by Co-Designing Cultural Heritage Artifacts in Collaborative VR

TL;DR

This paper explores how collaborative VR co-design, aided by Generative AI, enables shared storytelling and memory shaping of cultural heritage, revealing creative negotiation and adaptation processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel immersive workflow for co-creating virtual heritage artifacts using GenAI, highlighting collaborative negotiation and creative appropriation.

Findings

Participants merge prompts and placements during co-creation.

Spatial operations are used to express personal experiences.

Creative re-purposing of AI outputs enhances shared narratives.

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.