While there is a growing interest in exploring digital technologies to promote environmental awareness and stewardship, culturally grounded approaches, in which Indigenous knowledge systems shape Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, remain unexplored. This study aimed to develop a VR experience, which embeds ocean literacy in a cultural narrative of the Topnaar people. As Namibia's first documented inhabitants of the coast, they have developed a deeper connection with the ocean. The VR application, which has been co-created with members of the Topnaar community, allows for an embodied experience of collecting healing seaweed, while being accompanied by a Topnaar narrator in a visually appealing and realistic coast and underwater sea scene. Preliminary user evaluations confirm awe effects, as well as retention of the narrator statements. However further research is required to explore whether and how such VR experiences can promote ocean stewardship.

Indigenous oral traditions play a central role in preserving cultural knowledge; however, many are at risk of being lost and remain underexplored within immersive media. This paper presents Ostrich in the Sky, a virtual reality prototype designed to support the preservation and communication of Ju/’Hoansi San star lore through interactive storytelling. The paper contributes by presenting a complete VR development pipeline and demonstrating an iterative, community-informed design process that integrates Indigenous narration, visual references, and culturally grounded co-designed interactions.

This paper describes a participatory process involving a story team consisting of two community Elders, storyteller ≠ Oma /Kunta, traditional medicine man and educator !Amace N!aici, and translator Simon Kapembe from a San, Ju/’hoansi speaking community in North-Eastern Namibia, working together with researchers and Northern European students who prototyped a VR experience reflecting elements of the community’s intangible heritage of starlore and indigenous cosmology. Aiming to support the sharing and experiential understanding of starlore, this Work-in-Progress paper presents initial insights into the co-design process, outlines the development of the technical prototype, and shares the first findings and experiences from returning the VR prototype to the story team in the community.

Recent developments in Virtual Reality (VR) applications, such as hand gesture tracking, provide new opportunities to create embodied user experiences. Numerous gesture elicitation studies have been conducted. However, in most instances they lack validation of implemented gestures, as well diversity of participant groups. Our research explores the digitalization of intangible cultural heritage in collaboration with one of the San tribes in Southern Africa. The focus is on particular gestures as embodied interactions of a VR implementation of a traditional San hunting story. In this paper, we present a gesture study, which entails an in-situ elicitation of natural gestures, a co-designed integration, a VR story implementation with grasping and three mid-air gestures, and a user evaluation. Based on our findings, we discuss the anthropological value of gesture implementations determined by an indigenous community, the local usability of a grasping gesture, and in-VR gesture elicitation, as an extension of existing methods.

Recent improvements in hand-tracking technologies support novel applications and developments of gesture interactions in virtual reality (VR). Current implementations are mostly convention-based, originating in a Western technological context, thereby creating a legacy bias in gesture interaction implementations. With expanding application contexts and growing user groups and contexts, the design and selection of gestures need to be diversified. In this paper we present an exploration of natural gestures, followed by their implementation in a VR application and co-design of new gestures with a marginalized San community in Namibia. This study contributes to the still scarce empirical work in user-driven gesture design research, aiming to reduce legacy bias, on a methodological and technical level as well as through engaging non-WEIRD participants. Our findings confirm the applicability of our method, combined with Partner and Priming suggested by Morris et al., to the design of gestures inspired by natural interactions. We also consider the implementation of user-designed gestures to be necessary to asses usability, usefulness and technical issues in VR. Furthermore, the research directly advances the HCI agenda for diversity, through an ongoing research and design partnership with an indigenous community in Southern Africa, thereby challenging systemic bias and promoting design for the pluriverse.

Indigenous people (IP) living in remote areas, at the margins of mainstream society, are often the last ones to experience emerging technologies and even less to shape those experiences. It could be argued technology exposure and experience is necessary for IP to gain agency in making informed decisions on the rejection or appropriation of novel technologies. In this paper, VR is introduced to a remote San community within a broader community-based research collaboration considering political and ethical perspectives of technology inclusion. The intent was to familiarise the community with the technology through the development and playthrough of a game, to explore future opportunities for joint co-designs of VR applications, meanwhile gauging the barriers for how VR operates outside of its intended setting. The community members expressed their excitement about the experience and the desire to re-create traditional San games in VR. The paper reflects on the community experiences, the setup and use of VR in remote settings, and the choices made to facilitate the familiarization of emerging technology.

In earlier work it has been shown how culture can be used as a parameter influencing human robot interaction in general (e.g. [1]). While this is a good starting point, in our work with concrete application fields we encounter that culture in its usual definition as national culture (e.g. [2]; [3]) is too general a concept to be useful in these concrete applications. Thus, we shifted our focus instead to a concept of local cultural practices, which is derived from situated practices as in Wengers communities of practice [4] and grounded loosely in Sperbers idea of an epidemiology of representations [5], i.e. culture or rather cultural practices as an emergent phenomenon from learning processes in a given group. Developing this new kind of culture-aware robots can then not start from a general definition of culture like Hofstede [2], Schwartz and Sagiv [6], etc. but has to take the actual group of users (and stakeholders) into account. We exemplify this approach with our work in a residency for citizens with acquired brain damage.

One design endeavor we pursue in a long-term research and co-design project is the creation of a 3D visualization interface for an indigenous knowledge (IK) management system with rural dwellers of Herero ethnicity in Namibia. Evaluations of earlier prototypes and theories on cultural differences in perception led us to further investigate the suitability of different perspectives of view for the given user group. Through a combination of drawing sessions, design discussions and a high-fidelity technology probe we explored the visual perceptions and preferences of community members; specifically focusing on representation and recognition of objects and places in their everyday environment. We report how the findings from the study have informed design decisions for our particular system while also suggesting that certain viewing angles for 3D visualizations could be more suitable for rural dwellers in general and the collaborating community in specific.

This paper presents how to gain insights into children's navigation of an interactive virtual learning environment and how that would benefit their educators. A prototype for logging user information as quantifiable data has been developed and deployed in an in-situ evaluation of the system. The system collects a hidden corpus of data, which is visualized in order to assess if and how the interaction with the system reflects on the learning gains of the individual learners.