"Hua'er" and the Youth

Generating Embodied Storytelling and Interactive Experience of China Intangible Cultural Heritage “Hua'er” in Virtual Reality

1/31/22

Tranditional oral performance, Non-linear experience, Audience participating, ICH

Introdcution

Hua'er, a type of traditional oral performance, is one of the national intangible cultural heritages (ICH) in China. Experts have been trying to enhance public’s awareness of Hua’er protection through digital documentation technology, but there’s no efficacious means to attract interest and popularize knowledge yet. In this paper, we propose an interactive VR system engaging audiences to experience and understand the connotation of Hua’er performance. Based on an online survey with the public and in-depth interviews with Hua’er experts, we derive a set of design requirements for generating embodied storytelling and interactive experience in VR. Accordingly, we design “Hua’er and the Youth” (HY) that integrates three methods (virtual avatar, participatory performance, and game-based knowledge acquisition) and conduct a between-subjects user study to compare HY with the Comparison system. The results suggest that our methods significantly improved audience’s interactive experience, knowledge level and the awareness of ICH safeguarding.

This project was cooperated with Yu Lu, Yuetong Zhao and Xuning Yan, who were responsible for an initial version of the demo, and had lots of experience in interactive performance, gamification experience and VR developing.

Research Gap

How to transfer traditional cultural heritage into virtual reality digitalization, especially this oral performance form of art, and how to improve the public understanding and studying of the performance out of professional museums or theaters?

Innovations & Highlights

a VR design approach integrating virtual avatar, participatory performance, and game-based knowledge acquisition to overcome the challenges in generating embodied storytelling and active learning of Hua’er in a virtual environment.
design, technical and methodological implications on generating Hua’er knowledge and experience employing VR derived from user studies. Our methodology and insights are not unique to Hua’er only but can be employed by any other oral performance of ICH.

a VR design approach integrating virtual avatar, participatory performance, and game-based knowledge acquisition to overcome the challenges in generating embodied storytelling and active learning of Hua’er in a virtual environment.
design, technical and methodological implications on generating Hua’er knowledge and experience employing VR derived from user studies. Our methodology and insights are not unique to Hua’er only but can be employed by any other oral performance of ICH.

Display & User Study