🏛️ HeritageVibe — Bridging Vietnamese Heritage & Generative AI

💡 Inspiration

Vietnam is home to thousands of years of rich civilization, marked by UNESCO-recognized tangible and intangible heritages, sacred maritime territories like Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa, and hundreds of master craft villages. However, traditional cultural archives are often static, fragmented, and disconnected from younger generations and international travelers.

We envisioned HeritageVibe as a living, breathing cultural gateway: a modern platform where artificial intelligence doesn't just display static data, but actively narrates historical legends across multiple emotional tones, maps cultural coordinates with precision GIS layers, enables immersive WebAR previews, and autonomously discovers and enriches heritage records across all regions of Vietnam without hallucinations.

⚙️ How We Built It

HeritageVibe is built as a full-stack, real-time cultural intelligence platform with a resilient architecture:

1. Multi-Agent Conversational & Storytelling Engine:

   • Integrated Google Gemini Models (gemini-2.5-flash / gemini-2.5-pro with fallback hierarchy) via the @google/genai SDK.
   • Built a customizable Multi-Perspective Heritage Storyteller: generating immersive stories from different narrative archetypes (Elderly Historian, Local Tour Guide, Time Traveler, or Poetic Bard) with dual-language toggle (VI/EN).

2. Autonomous Self-Improving AI Discovery (Smart Regional Rotation):

   • Designed an automated cronjob pipeline that continuously discovers verified heritage entries across 10 distinct cultural zones (Northwest/Northeast, North Central, Champa South Central, Central Highlands, Mekong Delta, Maritime & Islands, Traditional Crafts, and Intangible Arts).
   • Applied strict exclusion filters and fuzzy deduplication algorithms: $$\text{Similarity}(S_1, S_2) = \frac{2 \cdot |S_1 \cap S_2|}{|S_1| + |S_2|} \ge \theta_{\text{threshold}}$$ ensuring that newly harvested heritages expand the knowledge base without duplicate entries.

3. High-Precision GIS Mapping & Maritime Sovereignty:

   • Leaflet-based interactive map using high-resolution Esri World Imagery satellite tiles and OpenStreetMap (free from API key limits and watermarks).
   • Explicitly mapped the sacred sovereignty of Hoàng Sa (Da Nang), Trường Sa (Khanh Hoa), DK1 Offshore Platforms, and major islands with real-time cultural metadata.

4. WebAR & Interactive Drum Experience:

   • WebXR/QuickLook/ModelViewer 3D AR previews for ancient relics.
   • Interactive 3D Đông Sơn Bronze Drum with authentic historical sound synthesis and interactive cultural glyph inspection.

5. Cloud Database & Verification Pipeline:

   • Cloud-native Firebase Firestore persistence for heritages, community traveler reviews, trip planners, and proof-of-knowledge audit logs.
   • Built-in Human-in-the-loop (HITL) proposal verification and automated deduplication dashboard.

🧠 What We Learned

• Domain-Specific Grounding: General AI queries for nationwide heritage often suffer from high repetition. Narrowing prompts down to specific geographic sub-regions and artisan disciplines dramatically increases the discovery yield of rare and authentic cultural artifacts.
• Bilingual Cultural Semantics: Translating nuanced Vietnamese Sino-Vietnamese terms (e.g., Nhã nhạc Cung đình, Hát Xoan, Lễ khao lề thế lính) requires carefully engineered system instructions and localized grounded fact schema.
• Zero-Dependency GIS Scalability: Utilizing enterprise open GIS tile providers ensures high reliability and cost-free uptime for educational initiatives.

🚧 Challenges We Faced

• Minimizing Hallucination in Cultural Data: Historical and geographic facts require 100% accuracy. We addressed this by enforcing a strict JSON Schema verification pipeline that validates national decree years, UNESCO years, and real GPS coordinates before persisting to Firestore.
• Handling High-Density Map Rendering on Mobile: Rendering hundreds of custom HTML interactive pins, sovereignty badges, and detail modals smoothly on mobile web required custom CSS hardware acceleration and optimized Leaflet layer clustering.
• Multi-Role & Audit Traceability: Balancing automated AI discovery with human editorial control by implementing a full audit log system (/proof) that tracks every AI proposal, state mutation, and community validation.

Built With

• bilingual-nlp
• firebase
• gemini-api
• google-cloud-run
• google-genai-sdk
• human-in-the-loop
• interactive-audio
• leaflet.js
• node.js
• react
• semantic-search
• typescript
• vite