Ātea Presence—Enabling Virtual Storytelling, Presence, and Tele-Co-Presence in an Indigenous Setting

Developing, evaluating, and disseminating IT research prototypes for and with indigenous partners is both challenging and rewarding. In conjunction with our domain expert collaborators, Te Rau Aroha Marae (Bluff, Aotearoa/New Zealand) and our academic colleagues at the universities of Waikato and Canterbury, we are implementing a mixed reality telepresence system to connect a diasporic Māori community to their historical, cultural and geographic mātauranga (knowledge). In this article we describe our project, Ātea Presence, which is guided by the principles of partnership, participation, and protection. We describe the design and evaluation of the system developed, the collaborative process we undertook with Te Rau Aroha Marae and our Māori academic colleagues and report on lessons learned along the way.