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.

This study explored how culturally grounded colour representations could be implemented in Virtual Reality (VR) environments, considering that cultural experiences and environmental contexts influence how colours are perceived. We engaged representatives of the ovaHimba people in Namibia. We used an iterative design approach with community feedback and validation sessions to select culturally meaningful colours for VR cultural heritage presentations. Based on a related study, which determined digital colour codes with members of an ovaHimba community, a VR scenario was developed. Feedback was collected through in-VR and post-VR interviews, and a thematic analysis was conducted to identify recurring patterns across participants’ responses. The analysis revealed four major themes, namely colour representation, realism and authenticity, cultural significance, and overall user experience. The study concludes that iterative community engagement and validation are essential in achieving culturally agreeable colour representations and lighting calibrations in VR. Further research is needed to systematise indigenous community guided colour coding in VR.

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.

Virtual reality (VR) applications hold great potential to create cultural experiences, yet they often focus on cultural heritage preservation incorporating entertainment rather than learning aspects.This study, embedded within a larger project of digitalising local traditional practices in VR, explored co-designing learning supports with primary school learners.Adopting a participatory design approach, learners participated in co-design sessions to create supports for a previously developed VR experience depicting a nomadic community's hunting process.Based on their designs, two prototypes were developed: a non-player character and a poster-board guide.Both were evaluated by the learners, and further design suggestions were gathered.The study offers insights into personalised learning experiences as envisioned by learners, highlighting the need for autonomy and agency, the dissonance between learners' preferences and authentic cultural knowledge transmission practices, as well as their reliance on familiar technological features.

Synchronous hybrid learning allows physically distributed students and teachers to participate simultaneously in learning activities. Despite the growing interest in synchronous hybrid learning, there remains a need for further investigation into effective pedagogical approaches and technological implementations that support teacher-student interactions at the school level. Addressing this, we present a prototype of an in-house holographic telepresence environment for synchronous hybrid learning, demonstrated through an exploratory study connecting students and teachers across two continents. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the six participating teachers to understand their experiences and perceptions related to the application of holographic telepresence for synchronous hybrid learning. Thematic analysis of the interview data highlights the pedagogical challenges that teachers faced, identifies technological environment design improvements, and outlines new opportunities for enhancing synchronous hybrid learning experiences. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on leveraging immersive technologies to enhance education in diverse and geographically separated settings.

Forming friendship with peers from diverse backgrounds is key to children’s social emotional development. In this study, we explored the use of social robot, Haru, as mediator for remote communication in children group, to support connection and friendship building. We invited children from different countries aged from 10 to 15 to participate in two interaction sessions with peers from other countries, after which we conducted interviews with children from three countries, focusing on their experiences, and perceptions of the robot’s roles in the process. The findings indicated that social robot Haru effectively served as an icebreaker and entertainer; However, improvements are needed in conversation flow, transitions between different roles, and supporting children’s autonomy in guiding the conversation and the depth of their communication.

Concerned with incorporating indigenous knowledge and the learning of traditional practices in formal education, we have created a Learn how to hunt like a San VR application in collaboration with primary school students in Namibia.The application is based on a previously developed and culturally validated VR hunting experience with a San partner community.We have extended the application with two features facilitating intentional learning, namely a poster board and a non-player character guiding players throughout the hunting experience.

As part of an attempt to co-create a comprehensive virtual environment in which one can explore and learn traditional practices of the OvaHimba people, we have co-designed and implemented a VR experience to construct a traditional food storage.In collaboration with the OvaHimba community residing in Otjisa, we have explored culturally valid representations of the process.We have further investigated different techniques such as photogrammetry, generative AI and manual methods to develop 3D models.Our findings highlight the importance of context, process, and community-defined relevance in co-design, the fluidity of cultural realities and virtual representations, as well as technical challenges.

In this paper we present the co-design and implementation of an extended reality escape room with 26 primary school students. The aim of our study was to explore the co-design process with students and to co-create a playable escape room, providing an asymmetric immersive experience in which players collaborate. We realised the complexity of designing such an escape room with primary students. We share our experiences and learnings in regard to required capacities and skills of co-designers, and adjustment of complexity and timing to players. We also maintain that the integration of extended reality technologies into escape rooms requires further research to realise asymmetric co-located collaboration.

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.

This paper presents a Smart City Hunt app, which was developed to engage diverse citizens by raising awareness, providing smart experiences and collecting data to guide strategies to transform the City of Windhoek into a smart and sustainable city. The project was done in collaboration with the UNDP accelerator lab Namibia, the City of Windhoek, and youth from informal settlements to explore alternative mechanisms of involving citizens from different backgrounds. Twenty-five participants took part in the half-day city hunt, making use of different modes of transport on their journey. The participants were guided via a location-based smart application, built with Locatify, which triggered challenges and important information such as identifying high carbon emitters and job vacancies respectively. A post-experience survey revealed that the participants recommend the use of the Smart City Hunt app for further citizen engagements, acknowledging the format of creating awareness and providing information on smart cities.

Augmented Reality (AR) is a new technology that enhances the actual world by superimposing computer-generated or extracted real-world sensory data such as images or sound onto it. Incorporating Augmented Reality into Cultural Heritage has a slew of benefits. Safeguarding of Cultural Heritage is vital because it serves as a link between the past and the present. Museums do not engage their audiences, particularly primary school-aged children, and as a result, youngsters show little interest in their cultural history, and museums cannot compete with more technologically advanced and modern kinds of entertainment. The purpose of this study was to spark children’s interest in Cultural Heritage as they engage with it. Under the project, a Cultural Heritage game using eight Ovahimba items was developed and tested at a local primary school. Research-by-Design was the primary methodology of this research project.

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.

Existing communication technologies have displayed a lack of affordances in supporting social-emotional connections, which is of particular interest in educational settings. We are therefore developing a live sensory immersive 3D video technology, built on a prior developed platform. Pilot trials in a Finnish school have yielded promising findings. We continue to advance the state-of-the-art platform in parallel with regards to 3D capture quality and data compression algorithms. Current developments entail joint investigations and evaluations of affordances to support emotional, social, motivational, and achievement impacts with learners and teachers from a Namibian and Finnish school. Participants can experience ”remote presence” wearing the hololens 2 while others are live streamed from another country captured by two cameras.

We present a virtual learning space station, a design space, which was co-designed by 63 school children from three continents, namely Namibia, Malaysia and Finland. The design space station is developed on the Ohyay platform for children by children to plan, interact and conduct co-design activities. In our hands-on demonstration, attendees can organise/join a design session and test the online collaboration and facilitation tools provided by the space station. Our demo contributes directly to the IMX 2022 theme of “Interactive Media Brings us Together”.

An increasing trend of digitally enhancing learning provides unique opportunities to expand from local to global learning environments. However, current technologies and educational approaches do not adequately support creative communication and learning for primary school learners across the globe. We maintain that it is important to promote agentic engagement amongst learners by involving them in the design of their own digitally enhanced learning environment. In this study, we connected ten learners from a Namibian and a Finnish school in virtual communications to co-design an interactive map game. Following a research through design approach, we share a detailed account of the case study in which we facilitated a distributed co-design process, using Skype, a custom made VR environment, and Microsoft Whiteboard. We reflect on the co-design sessions, focusing on communication and the design concept evolution contributing to distributed co-design methods and techniques not only for the design community but also as an agentic learning process that could be incorporated into formal learning environments. With a paucity of existing empirical work of geographically distributed co-design with children, our case study provides an empirical foundation pointing at critical issues to be further investigated such as multilingual design, social cohesion, facilitation roles, technologies, design breadcrumbs, negotiations and learner’s pride.

As technologies become pervasive, so does participation in memory making. But in contested environments and discourses, certain voices are rarely included in public memory. In this paper, we explore how everyday postcolonial memories of Namibian youth engaged the wider public into a dialogue revisiting narrative of the past in order to explore alternative futures. Voices of the youth were amplified through an experimental participatory public exhibition leveraging interactive technologies. The exhibition resulted from collaborative memory making with marginalised voices, highlighting the role of youth as agents for change in postcolonial Namibia. Experiences from the exhibition showed how meaningful dialogues and interactions between museum audiences, interactive installations and the youth, created new perspectives on postcolonialism, and how exploring everyday memories and materials from the past may contribute to creating inclusive futures. We conclude that new forms of dialogic engagements are created through 'blurred boundaries' between people, their collective memories and technologies.

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.

We report on a participatory design project that explored the use of child-created Personas to enable child designers to empathize with other children thereby contributing multiple divergent perspectives. The ongoing project aims to promote reading and creative writing skills among young children in Namibia. For decades libraries worldwide have been the key actors in fostering reading. Hence, in order to maintain their relevance, they are being re-conceptualized to cater for new needs and aspirations in the 21st century. In Namibia, dysfunctional public and school library services are lagging behind in this renovation effort, and are not contributing to the promotion of a reading culture. In an ongoing collaboration with a school in Windhoek, to design and implement an interactive tech library, 19 young learners engaged in weekly participatory design workshops to redesign their own school library. The children first created four distinct Personas for which they then modelled spaces and technologies. This paper reflects on the techniques used to enable children to become active design partners and to gain an understanding of designing for other children.

The extinction of indigenous languages, which convey cultural worldviews, remains a continued threat to cultural heritage preservation. The nomadic Penans in the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo, have developed Oroo', their own forest sign language, to communicate with each other. Yet with recent developments the younger generations are drawn more to technology than engaging with their surrounding forest, only vaguely remembers few signs. In this paper, we present one of our initiatives to reintroduce Oroo' to the younger Penan generation by digital means. Under the auspices of a long term collaboration with the Long Lamai community we have developed and evaluated a first digital Oroo' adventure game for the children. Results show a general interest in digital games with indigenous Penan contents albeit with a slight learning curve only. The project efforts rely on local community's active participation and using indigenous wisdom as an essential component to digitalize and preserve the language further.

In this paper, we describe our newest project endeavor in which we conceptualize crowdsourcing technology development for and with rural communities in Namibia. The project is based on design work which was carried out over a longer period of time with a single rural pilot community in Namibia and its transferability of technology and concepts into other rural communities. In an attempt to overcome expensive technology adaptations we explore the possibility of having rural communities' crowdsource their defined and specified technology needs. We describe the concept and our current implementation with a first user evaluation in two rural communities. We also discuss the next phase of the project.

Current human–computer interaction (HCI) paradigms are deeply rooted in a Western epistemology that attests its partiality and bias of its embedded assumptions, values, definitions, techniques, and derived frameworks and models. Thus tensions created between local cultures and HCI principles require researchers to pursue a more critical research agenda within an indigenous epistemology. In this article an Afro-centric paradigm is presented, as promoted by African scholars, as an alternative perspective to guide interaction design in a situated context in Africa and promote the reframing of HCI. A practical realization of this paradigm shift within our own community-driven design in Southern Africa is illustrated.

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.

We present the results of a usability evaluation of a locally developed hypermedia information system aiming at conservation biologists and wildlife managers in Namibia. Developer and end user come from different ethnic backgrounds, as is common to software development in Namibia and many developing countries. To overcome both the cultural and the authoritarian gap between usability evaluator and user, the evaluation was held as a workshop with usability evaluators who shared the target users’ ethnic and social backgrounds. Different data collection methods were used and results as well as specific incidences recorded. Results suggest that it is difficult for Namibian computer users to evaluate functionality independently from content. Users displayed evidence of a passive search strategy and an expectation that structure is provided rather than self generated. The comparison of data collection methods suggests that questionnaires are inappropriate in Namibia because they do not elicit a truthful response from participants who tend to provide answers they think are “expected”. The paper concludes that usability goals and methods have to be determined and defined within the target users’ cultural context.

The discipline of Software Engineering is continuously adapting to new challenges while gaining more and more insights. The age of globalisation has brought about a new movement of internationalisation and localisation. While practitioners fully embrace the efforts, educators only marginally consider the implications for the teaching and learning of Software Engineering. While the relevance of the software deployment context has been widely recognised, the intrinsic values of the development context are less evident. Besides western cultural indicators being omnipresent in software applications, they are deeply rooted in Software Engineering concepts and methods. Standards and models have been established in the absence of possible deviations from other -- e.g. African -- contexts. Educators and authors of common and internationally used textbooks present Software Engineering concepts and methods as universally valid. Thus software engineering graduates all over the world continue to be ill-equipped for specific software development contexts.