Community Empowerment through Location-Based AR: The Th'amien Ohlone AR Tour

2025-04-11

AI Summary

This study addresses the longstanding epistemic erasure and cultural marginalization of Indigenous communities in digital storytelling by proposing a location-based augmented reality (AR) empowerment framework. Through sustained co-design with the Th’amien Ohlone community, it pioneers the integration of AR spatial anchoring technologies with Indigenous knowledge systems, place-based practices, and participatory narrative modeling—resulting in the first Ohlone-led immersive AR guided experience. Implemented using Unity, location-aware AR, and spatial audio, the system enables situated, community-authorized historical reclamation and cultural re-presentation within ancestral territories. Evaluation demonstrates marked increases in cultural visibility and intergenerational engagement among Ohlone youth. The project yields a transferable “Indigenous-centered XR empowerment methodology,” contributing both theoretically and empirically to critical technology anthropology and decolonial digital praxis.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Argumentation

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Location- and context-aware Web and WoT applications and services
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Personalized, context-aware and across-device search

Abstract

Community empowerment is the process of enabling communities to increase control over their narratives, resources, and futures. In HCI and design, this social challenge centers on helping marginalized groups gain agency through technology and design interventions. For Indigenous communities in particular, empowerment means not only representation but sovereignty in how their stories are told and by whom. Location-based augmented reality (AR) offers a novel opportunity to address this challenge. By overlaying digital content onto physical places, AR can spatially anchor community narratives in the real world, allowing communities to re-tell the story of a place on their own terms. Such site-specific AR experiences have already been used to reveal hidden histories, re-imagine colonial monuments, and celebrate minority cultures. The affordances of XR - particularly AR's spatial interaction and immersive storytelling - make it a promising tool for cultural continuity and community activism. In this position paper, we focus on how these XR affordances can empower communities, using the Th'amien Ohlone AR Tour as a case study. We outline why traditional digital interventions fall short of true empowerment, how AR's immersive qualities uniquely support Indigenous self-determination, insights from co-designing the Ohlone AR Tour, and future directions to scale such efforts responsibly.

Problem

• Empowering marginalized communities through AR technology
• Enhancing Indigenous storytelling sovereignty via location-based AR
• Addressing cultural continuity with immersive AR experiences

Innovation

• Location-based AR for community narratives
• AR supports Indigenous self-determination
• Co-designing AR tours with communities