Yurt Portal: A Nomadic Spatial Media with Real-Time Cross-Cultural Mirroring for Embodied Digital Tourism

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Aziza Kanimetova, Burcu Nimet Dumlu, Ximing Shen, Mark Armstrong, Sohei Wakisaka, Takatoshi Yoshida, Kouta Minamizawa

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Abstract.

 

Digital tourism describes the activity of leveraging interactive media to engage in an immersive cultural encounter, which allows people to explore diverse cultures without physical restrictions. Due to limited promotion and visibility, Kyrgyz nomadic culture, a fundamental aspect of Kyrgyzstan, is often inaccessible to both locals and foreigners. We propose the interactive experience “Mirrored Culture,” which is a digital tourism experience inside a yurt – a traditional portable house that can mirror Kyrgyz cultural elements to the physical objects near its users using Stream Diffusion AI for human mirroring and object mirroring. The paper describes the iterative design process and preliminary study outcome of "Mirrored Culture" exhibited in the Japanese setting. During the three exhibitions in Japan, the pavilion allowed visitors to see themselves as nomadic figures and interact with nomadic objects. Our results show that "Mirrored Culture" helps users learn about different cultures and create a digital cultural twin.

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Keywords: Interactive systems, User studies, Digital cultural heritage