A Demonstration of an interactive Virtual Reality Prototype for Exploring the Cultural Heritage of Southern African Rock Art

In this paper, we describe an interactive implementation of a Virtual Reality prototype for creating rock art. The aim was to explore the possibilities of emerging technologies to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage of the San people in Namibia. The VR implementation combines an oral San tale narrative with the display of rock art paintings in a virtual cave. The user becomes a co-illustrator of the narrative being requested to paint or engrave the missing rock art in the cave. A user experience evaluation was conducted by eight San people from the Kalahari Desert. A logging system has been implemented to record detailed movements and interactions of the user throughout the system use. The interpretation of the logging data serves to understand user experiences and guide further system improvements.