“Blossoms Across Time: AI-Assisted Cultural Dialogue Through Diverse Artistic Expressions in VR Intangible Cultural Heritage Experience” by Wang, Wei, Fan and Liu
Conference:
Experience Type(s):
Title:
- Blossoms Across Time: AI-Assisted Cultural Dialogue Through Diverse Artistic Expressions in VR Intangible Cultural Heritage Experience
Presenter(s):
Description:
Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) serves as a bridge between past, present, and future. For ICH traditions that have experienced historical disruptions or involve ephemeral artistic creations, ancient texts and paintings provide invaluable insights, offering a means to imagine and revive lost practices. However, current VR systems for ICH often focus on static preservation rather than fostering creative reinterpretation, while AI applications remain largely limited to archival and documentation tasks. We present Timeless Blossoms, an AI-assisted VR system that enables practitioners to engage in realistic 3D flower arrangement while simultaneously witnessing their Traditional Chinese Flower Arrangement (TCFA) compositions transform into 2D Xieyi (expressive) paintings in real time. Our AI model, trained on historical TCFA paintings, employs a diffusion-based generative approach with Canny ControlNet to ensure stylistic consistency. This seamless interplay between 3D arrangement and 2D expressive painting reintroduces historical artistic dialogues within an immersive digital environment. Our work advances the discourse on AI-assisted cultural creativity by demonstrating how computational techniques can bridge diverse artistic expressions within ICH experiences. By enabling participants to engage in a cross-temporal and cross-medium creative process, Timeless Blossoms offers a novel approach to cultural heritage preservation through AI and VR. Future work will incorporate expert-guided reinforcement learning to refine stylistic intentionality and explore historical painting style transfer across different dynastic aesthetics, further enriching the cultural dialogue facilitated by immersive technology.
References:
[1] Florin Gîrbacia. 2024. An Analysis of Research Trends for Using Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Heritage. Electronics 13, 18 (2024), 3738.
[2] Lianying Wang and Kuijie Qin. 2020. Art of Traditional Chinese Flower Arrangement (first ed.). Chemical Industry Press.
[3] Yingna Wang, Qingqin Liu, Xiaoying Wei, and Mingming Fan. 2025. Facilitating Daily Practice in Intangible Cultural Heritage through Virtual Reality: A Case Study of Traditional Chinese Flower Arrangement. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems(CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1126, 17 pages.
