From Collage Elicitation to Immersive Interpretation: A Community-Participatory Approach for Interpreting Chinese Calligraphy Heritage

As a classic visual cultural heritage, Chinese calligraphy embeds aesthetic, historical, and philosophical meanings within its forms. These remain largely inaccessible without prolonged exposure, and conventional transmission often demands years of study or extensive narrative mediation. While Virtual Reality (VR) offers an immersive, embodied, and visually intuitive medium for disseminating such intangible heritage, current creation pipelines lack reproducible methods to integrate community interpretation. This often results in content that may fail to capture the lived cultural meaning. To bridge this gap, we propose a collage-driven, community-participatory elicitation workflow that operationalizes the traditional Heap of Ashes (Jin Hui Dui) aesthetic as a structured elicitation protocol, while also carrying its layered and juxtaposed visual logic into the composition of later VR scenes. By engaging 36 participants to generate 108 annotated collages, our approach systematically externalizes tacit understandings of calligraphic style into analyzable visual components. We synthesize these artifacts into three interpretive themes: Divinity, Humanity, and Individuality, and map them to VR spatial layouts and brushstroke aesthetics via a component-based visual mapping framework. Empirical evaluation suggests the effectiveness of this translation, indicating high interpretive legibility and perceived cultural engagement. This research contributes a transferable participatory workflow and a design-to-VR mapping strategy, illustrating how symbolic co-interpretation can help inform the design of immersive visual heritage experiences.