Navigating Folklore in Augmented Reality: 'Bu Mian You Yi' as a Gamified Museum of Macao's Maritime Heritage

This paper presents "Bu Mian You Yi" (The Sleepless Voyage), a location-based augmented reality application designed to preserve and revitalize the intangible cultural heritage of Macao's Inner Harbour. Framed as a "gamified museum," the project turns city streets into an interactive archive where players reconstruct fishermen's stories, dragon dance legends, and sea deity beliefs. The authors position the work as a response to fading local memory amid rapid urbanization and as a model for merging Macao's maritime identity with contemporary tourism.

The application is deployed along a 1.5km route from Beishanban Wharf to the Water Market and integrates nine interactive AR sites. Its central methodological contribution is an Artist-AI Collaborative Workflow, which combines hand-drawn artistic scripts with AI-generated 3D modeling to produce a visual style blending historical realism and folklore fantasy. Representative interactions include a simulated typhoon signal at a car park, artifacts unfrozen in mid-air through raycasting, and an auditory installation recreating the historical soundscape.

A field deployment with 500 participants, including both tourists and residents, was analyzed using the Stimulus-Organism-Response framework. The gamified experience significantly increased Aesthetic Emotion (M=3.21) and Sense of Presence (M=2.77). Mediation analysis indicated that Presence fully mediates the effect of emotional communication on willingness to recommend, and K-means clustering identified distinct user segments such as "Emotionally Resonant" and "Technology-First" users. Cultural motivation showed a stronger effect on experience quality (η²>0.56) than prior AR experience.

The authors conclude that framing digital games as curatorial tools offers a scalable approach to urban folklore preservation, and that artistic interpretation and narrative depth matter as much as technological fidelity in heritage gamification.