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

2026-04-16

AI Summary

This study investigates how virtual reality can support collaborative expression and transmission of collective memory in intangible cultural heritage. To this end, the authors developed a two-user immersive VR workflow that integrates generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) with spatial interaction techniques, enabling participants to co-design 3D artifacts and environments and transform individual recollections into shared narratives. The approach innovatively leverages spatial manipulation to negotiate multiple perspectives and creatively repurposes GenAI outputs when generation fails, thereby sustaining the evolution of collective storytelling. Experimental results demonstrate that participants effectively integrated textual prompts with model-generated layouts and employed embodied creation strategies to overcome GenAI limitations, successfully co-constructing and transmitting cultural memory within the immersive environment.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Natural Language Processing: Generation

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

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.

Problem

• cultural heritage
• collective memory
• collaborative VR
• shared narratives
• intangible heritage

Innovation

• Generative AI
• Collaborative VR
• Cultural Heritage
• Co-design
• Collective Memory