The Belitung Shipwreck in Virtual Reality: Exploring the Narrative Framework of Digital Cultural Heritage

Building on the work series of Belitung VR, this article seeks to explore a narrative framework for digital cultural heritage storytelling. Belitung VR is a serious game to disseminate Belitung-related cultural knowledge in VR, where users can freely explore in the reconstructed Arab dhow shipping between China and West Asia to collect clues to the causes of the wreck. The proposed framework consists of narrative goals (the physical and meta-physical), narrative elements (character, world and plot), and narrative grammar (immersion, interaction, rhetoric and factuality). This work can serve as a practice guide and evaluative framework for designers/artists with an aspiration to digitally disseminate cultural heritage.