The Kaiping Diaolou and Villages, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, exemplify hybrid Chinese and Western architecture shaped by migration culture. However, architectural heritage engagement often faces authenticity debates, resource constraints, and limited participatory approaches. This research explores current challenges of leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) for architectural heritage, and how AI-assisted interactive systems can foster cultural heritage understanding and preservation awareness. We conducted a formative study (N=14) to uncover empirical insights from heritage stakeholders that inform design. These insights informed the design of Gen-Diaolou, an integrated AI-assisted interactive system that supports heritage understanding and preservation. A pilot study (N=18) and a museum field study (N=26) provided converging evidence suggesting that Gen-Diaolou may support visitors’ diachronic understanding and preservation awareness, and together informed design implications for future human–AI collaborative systems for digital cultural heritage engagement. More broadly, this work bridges the research gap between passive heritage systems and unconstrained creative tools in the HCI domain.

Although virtual production (VP) offers cinematic and immersive storytelling by aligning a high-end camera with multiple LED screens through a central server, the creation of high-quality 3D scenery with real-time interactions remains complex and resource-intensive. This paper explores the potential of expanding cinematic virtual production scenes through three innovative AI-driven approaches: (1) AI-generated 360° panoramas from text prompts to produce immersive backgrounds; (2) Direct text/AI-generated image-to-3D environment conversion using mesh generation; (3) An end-to-end AI pipeline for rapid stylized scene construction. We demonstrate each workflow through real-time avatar-interactive shooting scenarios. Our approach bridges technical and artistic domains and aims to show how these AI-driven workflows could accelerate scene creation, enable novel cinematic experiences, and reveal the future potential of visual content generation.