AI-Enabled Cultural Heritage Preservation and a Browser-Based Virtual Museum: Design and Implementation of a Kenya Coastal Heritage Platform
Abstract
Coastal Kenya holds a wide-ranging cultural heritage expressed in material artefacts, oral traditions, indigenous and local languages, historical knowledge, and everyday community practices. Yet these resources are increasingly strained by modernisation and global circulation, shifting modes of cultural transmission, and gaps in systematic documentation. This study reports the design and implementation of the Kenya Coastal Heritage Digital Platform produced under the Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for the Preservation and Promotion of Coastal Cultural Heritage in Kenya (LAIPCH-K) project. The study examines how the project’s initially AI-focused aims were converted into a connected digital heritage system comprising a public heritage repository, a curator-mediated curation dashboard, and a browser-based virtual museum. Structured metadata, verified artefact records, multilingual resources, storytelling and oral-history materials, interactive 3D artefacts, and community-oriented governance arrangements are integrated into a single workflow. The virtual museum combines Three.js, WebGL, WebXR, Web Audio, and Web Speech, with procedurally generated Swahili-inspired architectural elements, first-person navigation, on-demand loading of validated 3D artefacts, and an animated multilingual cultural guide named Amina. The study follows a digital-heritage design and implementation pathway grounded in the LAIPCH-K proposal, project documentation, engineering specifications, and prototype development. The results demonstrate an operational pipeline linking heritage contribution to curation and validation, metadata management, publication, and immersive presentation. The evidence does not, however, establish visitor learning outcomes, community satisfaction, AI-model performance, or broader socioeconomic effects. The study argues that durable digital heritage preservation depends on aligning technical systems with metadata practice, provenance, cultural validation, multilingual representation, accessibility, governance, and sustained community participation.