Community Empowerment through Location-Based AR: The Thámien Ohlone AR Tour

Community empowerment is the process of enabling communities to increase control over their narratives, resources, and futures. In HCI and design, this social challenge centers on helping marginalized groups gain agency through technology and design interventions. For Indigenous communities in particular, empowerment means not only representation but sovereignty in how their stories are told and by whom. Location-based augmented reality (AR) offers a novel opportunity to address this challenge. By overlaying digital content onto physical places, AR can spatially anchor community narratives in the real world, allowing communities to re-tell the story of a place on their own terms. Such site-specific AR experiences have already been used to reveal hidden histories, re-imagine colonial monuments, and celebrate minority cultures. The affordances of XR - particularly ARś spatial interaction and immersive storytelling - make it a promising tool for cultural continuity and community activism. In this position paper, we focus on how these XR affordances can empower communities, using the Thámien Ohlone AR Tour as a case study. We outline why traditional digital interventions fall short of true empowerment, how AR's immersive qualities uniquely support Indigenous self-determination, insights from co-designing the Ohlone AR Tour, and future directions to scale such efforts responsibly.