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Moving Virtual Reality out of its Comfort Zone and Into the African Kalahari Desert Field: Experiences From Technological Co-Exploration With an Indigenous San Community in Namibia
Open accessAbstract
Indigenous people (IP) living in remote areas, at the margins of mainstream society, are often the last ones to experience emerging technologies and even less to shape those experiences. It could be argued technology exposure and experience is necessary for IP to gain agency in making informed decisions on the rejection or appropriation of novel technologies. In this paper, VR is introduced to a remote San community within a broader community-based research collaboration considering political and ethical perspectives of technology inclusion. The intent was to familiarise the community with the technology through the development and playthrough of a game, to explore future opportunities for joint co-designs of VR applications, meanwhile gauging the barriers for how VR operates outside of its intended setting. The community members expressed their excitement about the experience and the desire to re-create traditional San games in VR. The paper reflects on the community experiences, the setup and use of VR in remote settings, and the choices made to facilitate the familiarization of emerging technology.
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Both communities have been involved in co-designing emerging technologies over the past decade.
“Both communities have been involved in co-designing emerging technologies, such as digital repositories for indigenous knowledge [33] and augmented and virtual realities for preservation of their distinct heritage over the past decade [35, 52, 56].”
From Designing Responsible AI with Indigenous Communities: Towards Participatory AI with ovaHimba and San People in Namibia (2026) · cites this paper as [56]
Section 2.4 (p. 4) reports that the San community collaborated on multiple technology projects, including co-producing an augmented-reality souvenir. But the Introduction (p. 3) and Conclusion (p. 10) describe VR work as a first familiarization step toward future co-design, not a decade of VR co-design for heritage preservation. This paper also does not establish the claim about both communities. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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Research works printed but not linked: 32
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Indongo, N. N., Smith, R. C., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Kandjengo, S., & Mbinge, U. (2026) · Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference 2026, Vol. 1: Full Papers · doi:10.1145/3796624.3796667 · Cited by 1
“Both communities have been involved in co-designing emerging technologies, such as digital repositories for indigenous knowledge [33] and augmented and virtual realities for preservation of their distinct heritage over the past decade [35, 52, 56].”
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Rodil, K., Maasz, D., & Winschiers-Theophilus, H.
- Affiliations
- Aalborg University (DK)
- Namibia University of Science and Technology (NA)
- Faculty of Computer Science Namibia University of Sceince and Technology, Namibia
- Venue
- 26th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-11
- Pages
- 1-10
- OpenAlex
- W3097187219
- Cited by
- 21
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 6
- FWCI
- 2.09
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- vbn.aau.dk
- Locations
- ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST) (publishedVersion)
- VBN Forskningsportal (Aalborg Universitet) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › ICT in Developing Communities
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Keywords
- virtual reality, San people, Kalahari, indigenous peoples, community-based research, technology appropriation, traditional games, Namibia
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