philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

This Indigenous creator built a virtual reality program to celebrate First Nations cultures

Imagine there was a way to stand in the footsteps of an Indigenous person on the shores of Botany Bay the day before Captain Cook first arrived in Sydney. One digital developer has created an interactive and immersive virtual reality (VR) world where you can do just that.

For Kooma man and digital native Brett Leavy, promoting and protecting the collective knowledge of First Nations people is fine art.

Over the last 25 years, he’s been using digital technologies to engage young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with their history and cultures, culminating in the launch of a software development kit called Virtual Songlines.

“In a nutshell, we’re trying to build a virtual time machine to respectfully represent Indigenous heritage in public spaces,” he told create.

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“Our work explores our cultural heritage through what we are calling our cultural heritage intelligence programming system (or CHiPS),” he said.

“It’s where we program artificial intelligence in every animated person, animal and object. As an example, our animals in our virtual projects think, and each one of those animals doesn’t appreciate being hunted and will react to the player who is the hunter.”

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Leavy engages First Nations communities, researchers, historians and anthropologists to help verify and validate the knowledge he represents, while his team of designers and programmers create credible and authentic virtual artworks.

See the full story here: https://www.createdigital.org.au/indigenous-creator-builds-virtual-reality-program-first-nations-cultures/