Community Empowerment through Location-Based AR: The Thámien Ohlone AR Tour

TL;DR

The paper addresses the problem of genuine empowerment for Indigenous communities in technology-enabled storytelling, critiqueing traditional digital interventions that are top-down and structurally limiting. It advocates for location-based AR as a means to anchor Indigenous narratives in place, leveraging XR affordances—spatial interactivity and immersion—for community control and cultural continuity. Through the Thámien Ohlone AR Tour, co-designed with the Muwekma Ohlone and SCU, the authors demonstrate a rigorous participatory process that builds tech literacy among youth, foregrounds Elders' voices, and anchors narratives to physical sites on campus, thereby reinforcing sovereignty and presence. The work argues that XR can become a platform for social justice and self-determination when governance, inclusivity, and ethics are integral to the design and deployment, with scalable pathways via toolkits and open infrastructure.

Abstract

Community empowerment is the process of enabling communities to increase control over their narratives, resources, and futures. In HCI and design, this social challenge centers on helping marginalized groups gain agency through technology and design interventions. For Indigenous communities in particular, empowerment means not only representation but sovereignty in how their stories are told and by whom. Location-based augmented reality (AR) offers a novel opportunity to address this challenge. By overlaying digital content onto physical places, AR can spatially anchor community narratives in the real world, allowing communities to re-tell the story of a place on their own terms. Such site-specific AR experiences have already been used to reveal hidden histories, re-imagine colonial monuments, and celebrate minority cultures. The affordances of XR - particularly ARś spatial interaction and immersive storytelling - make it a promising tool for cultural continuity and community activism. In this position paper, we focus on how these XR affordances can empower communities, using the Thámien Ohlone AR Tour as a case study. We outline why traditional digital interventions fall short of true empowerment, how AR's immersive qualities uniquely support Indigenous self-determination, insights from co-designing the Ohlone AR Tour, and future directions to scale such efforts responsibly.