What is the name of your organization?
Pacific Blue Studios
What is the name of your solution?
Ahupuaʻa XR
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
An immersive social extended reality communication platform for exploring, dreaming and adapting in the face of community challenges across Hawaiʻi
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Honolulu, HI, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Ahupuaʻa XR addresses the disconnection from one another, shared genealogies and stories, and from ʻāina (land) that many Native Hawaiians experience as a result of the impacts of colonization, militarization and exploitative capitalism in the islands over the past 200+ years. Specifically, there are now more Native Hawaiians residing outside of the Hawaiians Islands than inside, and there are extremely limited sovereign lands even for Native Hawaiians living in the islands to access for community, cultural and ecological purposes. This makes it especially difficult for the Native Hawaiian community to build shared dreams and visions for what the future of the islands and community could and should look like in terms of food, energy, and land sovereignty.
What is your solution?
Ahupuaʻa XR is about connection. Largely defined by the flow of, and access to, fresh water, and the associated resource abundance it precludes, ahupuaʻa were the socio-ecological land divisions and resource management protocol that supported sustainability, resource regeneration and abundance in Hawaiian society. They connected communities to the collective care and stewardship of their places, and often extended from ridge top to the fishing grounds beyond the reef. Ahupuaʻa XR uses contemporary 3D geospatial technologies and community-generated maps to provide digital reflections of ahupuaʻa systems in social, immersive extended reality (XR). We are currently generating our 3D maps using aerial and underwater photogrammetry and publicly available data, and publishing these to the web-based social VR platform, Spatial.io, where they are accessible in web browsers, a smart phone application and through Meta Quest. The social and immersive worlds are spaces for gathering, sharing, teaching, learning, exploring, dreaming and building the future of the Hawaiian Islands together across the entire Native Hawaiian community within and beyond the islands.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Ahupuaʻa XR serves the Native Hawaiian community living in the islands as well as the diaspora community. In total, itʻs about 700,000 people roughly split between living in Hawaiʻi and living in the continental United States. Specifically, Ahupuaʻa XR aims to serve the community of Native Hawaiians living at Puʻuhonua o Waimānalo on the island of Oʻahu, and the Nation of Hawaiʻi. This community has been severely impacted by the historical trauma of the illegal overthrow and occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and currently faces a crisis in the cost of housing, access to land, and mismanagement of resources by state and federal entities. Because this community is now split between the continental United States and the Hawaiian Islands, and because of the challenges associated with living under continued occupation mentioned above, Ahupuaʻa XR provides a social, immersive digital reflection of our shared island home that encourages the co-creation of a shared vision, dreams and problem solving across the community.
