Mixed Reality Scenic Live Streaming for Cultural Heritage: Visual Interactions in a Historic Landscape

Scenic Live Streams (SLS), capturing real-world scenic sites from fixed cameras without streamers, have gained increasing popularity recently. They afford unique real-time lenses into remote sites for viewers' synchronous and collective engagement. Foregrounding its lack of dynamism and interactivity, we aim to maximize the potential of SLS by making it interactive. Namely MRSLS, we overlaid plain SLS with interactive Mixed Reality content that matches the site's geographical structures and local cultural backgrounds. We further highlight the substantial benefit of MRSLS to cultural heritage site interactions, and we demonstrate this design proposal with an MRSLS prototype at a UNESCO-listed heritage site in China. The design process includes an interview (N=6) to pinpoint local scenery and culture, as well as two iterative design studies (N=15, 14). A mixed-methods, between-subjects study (N=43, 37) shows that MRSLS affords immersive scenery appreciation, effective cultural imprints, and vivid shared experience. With its balance between cultural, participatory, and authentic attributes, we appeal for more HCI attention to (MR)SLS as an under-explored design space.