Preserving San stories and culture using virtual reality
Nicole Chidrawi, University of Cape Town
For their Honours project in Computer Science, three University of Cape Town
students are planning to tell a traditional San story using virtual reality
technology.
Although virtual reality has been used before for different topics, including
an African art gallery, projects dealing with the San and the African oral
tradition of storytelling are relatively novel.
Ilda Ladeira, Sarah Brown and Cara Winterbottom will retell the story of the
mantis, who in San tradition, is a notorious trickster with a penchant for
scaring children.
"After reading a whole lot of San stories, which had been loosely
translated into English, we all agreed on the mantis/trickster story," says
Ladeira of the group's choice of story.
"We felt it would make an interesting environment and we could have static
paintings to illustrate it."
In addition to telling the story, the students will also run a series of
tests on the use of virtual reality. Supervised by Prof Edwin Blake, Director of
the Collaborative Visual Computing Lab in the Department of Computer Science,
the student's project will focus on mediation or the sound and visual aspects
that are added to the environment enabling the user to understand and enjoy the
story more.
Winterbottom explains, "Virtual reality is basically like watching a
movie on a computer screen except that you take part in the movie. You get to
navigate the environment of the movie using the keyboard and the use of goggles
makes everything more 3D in perspective."
She notes that virtual reality however tends to be more interactive in that
the characters respond to your actions. Because of this the user tends to feel
as if he/she were actually in the movie rather than just watching it.
"With our project we are basically experimenting with what causes people
to feel more present in a virtual environment," adds Winterbottom.
The students will first create the virtual environment, which includes
listening to the story in a cave complete with a roaring fire and bushmen
paintings. They will then set about testing whether sound, pictures or a
combination of both make the user feel as if they are actually in the cave
listening to the story.
Work by John Turest-Swartz from Contemporary African Music and Arts Archive (CAMA)
at UCT and Masophia Leosan, a computer science Masters student at UCT, was
instrumental in the project's conception.
CAMA had been collecting San stories for preservation and Leosan had also
undertaken a virtual reality project that tested levels of interactivity.
"After researching CAMA's work we realized that virtual reality might be
a way of preserving the San stories and culture," says Brown. "Masophia's
work also influenced our choice but whereas she's testing interactivity, we
decided to test mediation in the form of pictures and sounds."
According to Brown the value of computer science and a project of this nature
is that it not only allows for the preservation of the San culture in an
interactive way but it serves as an educative tool. It is also a means of making
high technology accessible to the public.
Ladeira adds, "It's important for the public and school children to be
made aware that computer science is not just about electrical circuits and
hardware. The value of computer science and something like virtual reality is
that the users can fully interact with an old culture or event that would not
have otherwise been accessible to them."
If everything goes according to plan the students are hoping to set up their
project in the Discovery Room at the South African Museum in Cape Town towards
the end of the year.
Article by Nicole Chidrawi, the Department of Communication and Marketing
University of Cape Town
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