VR brought into the Bush: Donkerbos enhancing VR

The community in Donkerbos is currently contributing to the development of natural hand gestures, which are to be used in a Virtual Reality (VR) system. Bringing VR into the bush with local communities provided community members an opportunity to re-explore interactions in VR as they enhanced and extended their VR experience with the said system.

On a recent MTC-funded trip to Donkerbos , led by Prof Heike Winschiers-Theophilus from NUST and Dr Kasper Rodil together with Emilie Arendttorp, both from Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark, a new prototype developed by students at AAU, was evaluated. The prototype consisted of hand gestures which have been co-designed by the community on a previous visit. Four movement gestures were implemented, which are used to guide a person back, forwards, left, and right.

After having tried the prototype the community provided feedback upon the implemented gestures for further development. The next step is to implement an old traditional San story into VR while continuing the work on exploring the use of natural gestures.