Liye SlipScape: From Text to Context Through an Immersive Narrative Experience for the Liye Qin Slips

Text-bearing artifacts such as the Liye Qin Slips pose particular challenges for immersive interpretation because their material form, textual records, and historical contexts are often fragmented. This study conducted a formative survey to identify barriers to artifact perception, textual understanding, and historical contextualization, and proposed a Perceptibility–Comprehensibility–Empathy (PCE) framework for immersive heritage interpretation. Guided by this framework, we developed Liye SlipScape, an evidence-grounded virtual reality (VR) system integrating embodied interaction, generative AI-assisted asset production, digital historical characters, and retrieval-augmented question answering. Archaeological records and scholarly sources were used to constrain AI-assisted reconstruction, while a domain-specific knowledge base grounded conversational interaction with historical characters. The system reconnects artifact inspection and bamboo-slip production with administrative practices and the everyday use of the Nine-Nine Table through a progressive immersive narrative. A mixed-methods evaluation involving 30 participants compared the PCE-guided experience with a conventional VR control condition in a within-subject design. The PCE condition received higher ratings across all seven experience dimensions, particularly in Emotion, Engagement, and Immersion. The findings suggest that the PCE-guided approach can support more engaging, immersive, and emotionally meaningful experiences by connecting text-bearing heritage with historical contexts and embodied participation.