Exploring the Henro Michi: Student-Centered Field Research in Japan as a Component of the Virtual Shikoku Pilgrimage Project

During the 2018–2019 academic year, the authors had the opportunity to begin work on a unique multi-year virtual heritage Virtual Shikoku Pilgrimage (VSP) project. The main goal of this project is to design and develop an immersive virtual landscape exploration platform that uses 3-D digital technologies, including the Unity video game engine development platform and 3-D modeling software such as Blender and SketchUp (Blender Foundation 2020; Trimble, Inc 2020; Unity Technologies 2020), to recreate the cultural and natural landscapes of the temples and surroundings that make up the 750-mile (1,200-kilometer) 88-temple Buddhist pilgrimage around the perimeter of the island of Shikoku, Japan (Figure 1). The VSP project builds on the growing body of literature and implementations centered around virtual heritage, which is focused on digital visualizations and interpretations of cultural heritage objects and landscapes (Jacobsen and Holden 2007). Many of these projects seek to “recreate” or “reconstruct” elements of physical places and spaces with cultural meaning within a digital environment that can be navigated and enhanced with embedded information and interactive elements (Champion and Bharat 2007). The VSP project was conceived as more than just a recreation of the temples and landscapes of the Shikoku pilgrimage in digital form; it is rather an immersive and interactive virtual platform where the experiences of those places and spaces can be represented and explored through interactive multimedia and objects (Bekele and Champion 2019). One of the core goals of this virtual heritage work is not only to explore the virtual recreation of cultural landscapes as immersive digital experiences but also to delve into the challenges of visualizing and representing knowledge within such a platform (Ghani, Rafi, and Woods 2020; Flaten et al. 2014). Through collaboration using the tools of our respective disciplines, Geography, Religious Studies, and our university’s Digital Culture and Design program, this project aims to utilize the virtual landscape platform to embed digital stories and media elements within an immersive virtual space that allows teachers and students of a wide range of disciplines to more broadly delve into the experience of the Shikoku Pilgrimage from their own homes and classrooms. Those who access the completed VSP platform will be able to virtually traverse the changing landscapes of the routes, enter temples, and interact with others along the pilgrimage just as one would do in Shikoku. This will be achieved through images and words of those who take part in the pilgrimage, of local residents who live and work within the temples and surroundings, and of scholars who have studied the pilgrimage and its importance. The first phase of the VSP project focused on background research, initial design ideas, the research trip to Japan in May 2019, and the initial design and development of a prototype focused on the first three temples in the pilgrimage. This portion of the VSP project was funded by the [Grantmaker] program, which enabled the VSP project leaders to take six students to Japan to learn and gather multimedia data as well as to continue work with the team following the fieldwork to build the first phase prototype of the VSP platform. Student research funding from Coastal Carolina University (CCU) also supported two additional undergraduate research student-fellows to assist in the development of the prototype and continued work on the project in the 2019–2020 academic year.