Visualization of virtual indigenous tribes using immersive virtual reality technology

The indigenous peoples have been living in Taiwan for thousands years. Comparing to the western-style science education, they have completely different pedagogy to establish and to pass their own environmental knowledge, living style, technology, science, and culture. However, the young generation of the indigenous people is losing their traditional point of view to their environment under current education system. Especially for the indigenous peoples who moved to cities for living, their young generation even barely recognize their original home tribes. The opportunities for them to learn how to interact with natural environmental resources, such as farming and hunting, with their parents are significantly decreased. In order to enable urban indigenous youths to learn the indigenous environmental knowledge in a more intuitive way, we proposed a novel concept called “Virtual Indigenous Tribe” in this study. Virtual Reality (VR) has flourished in recent years. It is also one of the common ways of digital learning. The immersive virtual reality technology is adopted to build “Virtual Indigenous Tribe” for visualizing the living environment of indigenous peoples. First, we take 360° panoramic photos for tribal environments, combined with the immersive virtual reality makes users feel as if they are in the local area. Then, we collect indigenous traditional environmental knowledge through interviews with elders. Multimedia such as recordings and demonstration videos of the elders can also be placed in the virtual reality. We develop immersive virtual tribe by the software - Unity, integrating 360° panoramic photos, indigenous environmental knowledge and multimedia. The Google VR SDK for Unity plug-in allows users to develop virtual reality apps with Google Cardboard as a display tool. In conclusion, the young generation of the indigenous people can experience immersive virtual tribe through low-cost Google Cardboard, understand the tribal environment, and learn the traditional environmental knowledge in a more authentic and intuitive way. We hope the “Virtual Indigenous Tribe” will motivate the younger generation of the indigenous people and improve the learning achievement.