"From remembering to shaping": Narrating Shared Experiences by Co-Designing Cultural Heritage Artifacts in Collaborative VR
For HCI and cultural heritage researchers, this paper provides a qualitative study of collaborative VR workflows with GenAI, revealing how users overcome AI limitations through creative appropriation.
This work explores how people co-design 3D artifacts in virtual heritage sites using Generative AI to narrate shared cultural memories. Observations show participants negotiate perspectives through merged prompts and spatial operations, creatively repurposing unsatisfactory AI outputs to sustain shared narratives.
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.