Embodied Transmission: Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage through Procedural VR Experience-A Case Study on Chinese Shadow Puppetry

Intangible cultural heritage, especially traditional crafts like Chinese shadow puppetry, faces a crisis in transmitting its tacit knowl-edge and procedural skills, which are difficult to articulate and often lost in conventional preservation.Existing digital methods, such as video recording and 3D scanning, primarily capture static forms but fail to con-vey the embodied experience of making and performing, leaving learners as passive observers.This paper proposes a new paradigm, "Embodied Transmission," grounded in Embodied Cognition theory and supported by Virtual Reality (VR).Unlike static archiving, this approach enables active, immersive skill acquisition.Using the VR application Shadow Play of Time and Space as a case study, we analyze how the system deconstructs shadow puppetry into interactive tasks: carving and color-ing, assembling, and performance, supported by sensorimotor feedback.Through examining its design, interaction mechanisms, and pedagogical logic, we argue that VR fosters presence, agency, and embodiment, which promote procedural memory and tacit knowledge acquisition.This research highlights VR's potential to revitalize endangered heritage while contributing new perspectives to digital humanities practice.