Are Foxes Good or Evil? Multi-perspective AR Fosters Comprehensive Understanding of Contested Cultural Symbols

Abstract

Contested cultural symbols often carry multiple and changing meanings, yet contemporary digital media tend to flatten them into stereotypes. This study presents FoxARia, a Multi-perspective AR narrative system that supports public interpretation of contested cultural symbols through the case of Chinese fox spirit culture. Drawing on perspective-taking, the system guides users through three progressive cognitive roles, the Practitioner, the Adjudicator, and the Listener, by combining H5-based narrative tasks with embodied AR interactions. A mixed-methods user study revealed that multi-perspective taking helped participants develop a more comprehensive understanding of the fox spirit, and that AR-based interactions made it easier to immersively enter different standpoints, which facilitated active meaning negotiation among competing interpretations, and consequently shifted them from stereotypical impressions toward a more nuanced view. This work contributes a design framework that operationalizes perspective-taking for contested cultural symbols in interactive cultural heritage.