MIT Solve

Solution Overview

Solution Name

VIHEJO - Vietnam Heritage Journey

One-line solution summary.

A multimedia and interactive website to enhance the understanding and the interest of Vietnamese and foreigners about Vietnam's heritages

Elevator pitch

What is your solution?

Though the difficulties of access, VIHEJO website ensures that everyone living inside and outside Vietnam would be able to experience all the heritages of Vietnam online from everywhere in the world.

To replace the old-fashioned documentary films or low quality films which are boring to many people, we also included lively, high quality videos for every heritage. We also try to produce creative contents.

Many people are interested in learning about Vietnam's heritages but they cannot read Vietnamese. We develop the website with Vietnamese and English first, and then other languages.

We take advantages of the technologies developed by Human Machine Interaction Lab's Trealet projects to display text, video, audio, images, and also use maps, games, quizzes, slideshow,... to make the users more engaged with the heritage information.

Also, we apply the Model-View-Controller pattern to develop the website, using PHP Laravel as the main programming language. We also use HTML - CSS - Javascript / Jquery to develop the UI section.

Lastly, the main focus of this project is to encourage people to discover about our national heritages, so we also feature highly interactive games and quizzes about the heritages to keep them engaged.

What specific problem are you trying to solve?

Nowadays, people find it hard to research intangible cultural heritages because of the difficulty in finding the exact information, the lack of heritage research tools, the Covid – 19 pandemic, and so on. These difficulties make Vietnamese, especially Vietnamese youths, have only a little knowledge or can not understand their traditional culture. The foreigners who want to learn about Vietnam's traditional culture do not know many reliable sources. Moreover, sometimes, people can not go to the area which has cultural heritages because the distance is too far.

Our team created a website that provides the high quality information about heritages of Vietnam, starting with 14 intangible cultural heritages of Vietnam which were inscipted in UNESCO's Represetative list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity and List of intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding, with the demo version focusing on the Practices of The Viet's Mother Goddess of Three Realms to introduce to Vietnamese and foreigners. Our website helps people easily access anytime and anywhere in many ways such as text, image, video, map, and so on, and can play some fun interactions with the systems through games and quizzes. They also can contribute contents to the system or send the feedbacks.

Who does your solution serve? In what ways will the solution impact their lives?

VIHEJO project is established for Vietnamese and foreigners with focus on youths but also open to people of all ages. We see that though youths, for example students and pupils, many of them are interested in learning about Vietnam's cultural heritages but they do not find attractive sources to engage with. According to our survey, many of them knew some names of the country's typical heritages but they do not understand well or quite well about these heritages. They also expect to have more attractive materials about cultural heritages for them to learn.

VIHEJO provides a website about Vietnam's heritage which is friendly to the youths, not only for learning but also for entertainment anytime and anywhere.

Accessing our website, they can explore the information by text, image, video in high quality and artistic content. Moreover, they can interact with us through games, quizzes, exploring the maps and by uploading their video, audio, or typing anything involving the heritage, etc.

Though the targeted users for VIHEJO website are young people, we believe that the website also serves well the need and interests of people who wish to learn more deeply about Vietnamese cultural heritage. Many Vietnamese and foreigners living inside and outside Vietnam, of different ages have shared about the obstacles of lacking reliable information, lack of access to the site due to distance or covid situation, lack of guidance in English (and other languages), lack of high quality and attractive materials, or lack of expert level materials,... about Vietnam's cultural heritages. VIHEJO website can help them to address these issues and help them improve the understanding and experiences about Vietnam's cultural heritages. VIHEJO can be a helpful source for lifelong learning for people about Vietnam heritages.

What steps have you taken to understand the needs of the population you want to serve?

First, we interviewed visitors at museums in Vietnam, such as National Museum of History about their demand of learning and researching about Vietnam’s heritage culture. Visitors showed us about what difficulties they have to face to when they search the information about Vietnam heritages on the Internet and how they feel when they need to look for the information in many websites even though the unreliable website.

Next, we designed a survey online to collect information about the level of interest of Vietnamese and foreigners living in Vietnam and in other countries in Vietnam's intangible cultural heritage, their obstacles or difficulties in understanding the intangible cultural heritage of Vietnam, their expectations in understanding the intangible cultural heritage of Vietnam on a digital platform, and the preferred media and materials for learning about Vietnam's cultural heritage online. Majority of our respondents were students. We also got the answers from people of different jobs.

We also continuously attendeded conferences and seminars to get to know about trends of GLAM sectors and digital cultural education in Vietnam and in the world.

So we've got to know about the needs of the users about digital cultural heritage education.

Which aspects of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Improving learning opportunities and outcomes for learners across their lifetimes, from early childhood on (Learning)

Our solution's stage of development:

Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business model

Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution—in other words, what have you accomplished to date?

VIHEJO inherits the achievements of Trealet projects about tools for digital cultural heritage education and focuses on making a website of Vietnam's cultural heritage. It is concepted as a tour to discover different heritages of Vietnam, and with each heritage, the user can experience one or more lively tours with multimedia material and interactive experiences, of which we call "trealet(s)".

Though the Trealet project about digital cultural heritages have been started from 5 months earlier by managers who are also our mentors, our group just has one member who followed the Trealet project from early time, while all the others have just introduced to the VIHEJO project just within one month. We could prototyped the overview website that briefly describes Vietnam heritage journey, firstly with 14 selected intangible cultural heritages. In this website, we deployed different interfaces corresponding to different ways of exploring the heritages (for example: streamlines, stepquest, map, …). Some functions have been tested well on our demo website but some Trealet's functions have not yet been applied and displayed on VIHEJO. We believe that in the coming time, functions like Quizzes, slideshow, map, games,... would be applied to VIHEJO well to foster the lively experiences of the users. Also, with the available technologies, we also paid efforts to the development of high quality multimedia content.

Currently, the website only supports Vietnamese and English versions. In the future, there may be other versions of international and Vietnam's minority languages.

Our team is on the way to finalize the core features and interfaces of the website. We will work on to apply more features such as 3D exhibition rooms, slideshow, interactive games, 360-degree videos, etc.

Where our solution team is headquartered or located:

Hà Nội, Hoàn Kiếm, Hà Nội, Việt Nam

Team Lead:

Nguyen Thi Khanh Ly