Researchers from Queen Mary University have helped create the Xingu Village installation taking visitors to the heart of Brazil’s native communities.
The university’s People’s Palace Projects at Mile End has teamed up with the Horniman Museum in south London for an installation this weekend that gives visitors access to the Kuikuro community in the Amazon.
Visitors go on a virtual journey to Ipatse village to see the day to day life, environment and cultural practices of the Kuikuro’s 800 people living in the Xingu protected area, which is home to 16 indigenous tribes.
“We learn From the Xingu how arts and cultural practices preserve life and protect the global environment,” People’s Palace projects director Prof Paul Heritage explained.
“This international partnership project shows how immersive technologies create new connections between objects and people, revealing the stories we need to tell and to hear about the world around us.”
The installation combining digital content with virtual ‘reality’ tools is the first of its kind, which involves indigenous peoples directly in a process that preserves and disseminates their social and cultural histories with non-contact technologies.
The project raises awareness of remote and fragile indigenous peoples without putting them at risk, whose way of life is beyond the reach of the world’s general population.
The 30-minute experience combines Queen Mary’s anthropological research with technology to bring to life a culture from the other side of the globe.
Horniman Museum’s Robert Storrie said: “Our gallery allows you to see different ways of living around the world through sounds and images.
“But the ‘Xingu Village’ project takes a step further into an immersive encounter with the Kuikuro people’s everyday life.”
Holographic Augmented Reality can contribute a lot to museums. This technology increases the feeling of presence (one of the fields that are studied by the Thematic Area 4 of the ViMM project, alongside with the Storytelling and Gamification fields), by providing the users with partial immersion since they still have access to the real world. This is a very exciting feature that could make the museum experience more fun and interesting and thus contribute to the preservation of cultural heritage.
