“There’s a connection between you and me”: exploring human values through social virtual reality for cultural heritage

To what extent can virtual reality (VR) for cultural heritage support contemporary audiences in exploring unfamiliar human values and complicated socio-economic contexts? While collaborative VR experiences are increasingly used to inform people about the past, their application to more speculative matters - e.g., alternative social values - to foster more varied outcomes, like historical empathy and care, is uncommon. This paper investigates how archaeological interpretations of egalitarian ways of living can be translated into social interaction design for heritage VR, and what impacts these interaction patterns have on participants. We present ÇVR, a multi-user immersive VR experience that prioritizes values-led engagement through collaboration, with the aim of supporting reflection beyond conventional educational outcomes. Seventeen pairs of collocated participants explore a reconstruction of a Neolithic heritage site and, through guided tasks and conversation, perform social practices suggesting egalitarian values, inspired by archaeological evidence. Our research finds that these interactions promote mutual support, perspective-taking, collaborative meaning-making, and affective engagement with both the people of the past and their present-day partners. We contribute a framework for operationalizing hypothesized human values through social interaction design in heritage VR, together with empirical insights into how collaborative interaction can support historical empathy, care, and reflective engagement with the past.