A network of immersive, participatory site-specific Mixed Reality experiences in the heart of major European cities that make the invisible history of the Jewish Quarters & ghettos visible.

When someone – either a local or a tourist – walking today in Budapest’s Rumbach street says “Let’s get a drink!”, they are unaware that in 1944, it was that particular street that hosted the Budapest Ghetto’s last working water tap, providing the last drips of hope for 80,000 entrapped Hungarian jews.

When they are checking out hip clothes in the nearby vintage store, they miss out on the story: in 1944 that street hosted the manufactory of a Christian dyer who hid 100 jews in his workshop to save them from deportation.

When history becomes invisible, history is forgotten.

Starring the Academy-Award-winning Géza Röhrig and designed by a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, If These Streets Could Talk is a state-of-the-art, site-specific interactive mobile Augmented Reality experience with a pilot chapter in Budapest that makes the invisible history of European cities visible.

Team

  • Barna Szász

    Director (HU)

    Barna Szász is an internationally recognized documentarian with works featured by PBS, The Guardian and Vimeo Staff Pick and he teaches narrative XR at Stanford University.

    Barna’s Jewish grandma was taken to the Budapest ghetto, but she always refused to talk about the past – so for Barna, this project is a very personal one. He brings his expertise in documentary and vision for AR storytelling into the project.

  • Dr. Victoria Walden

    Digital Ethics Consultant (UK)

    Victoria is a media theorist at the University of Sussex, researching Digital Media and Genocide Memory, with a particular focus on the Holocaust.
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    As the primary investigator of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, Victoria helps this project to think through difficult questions about immersion, interactivity, and digital ethics in relation to the Jewish expeirience & Holocaust representation.

  • Dane Christensen

    Technical Artist (USA)

    Dane is a Danish-American immersive media artist who explores space, identity and perspective. He teaches XR workshops and produces intermedia installations around the world.

    Dane is a storytelling tech nerd, who’s always years ahead of the industry, so he naturally brings the newest technological solutions into the project.

  • Dr. Borbála Klacsmann

    Historian (HU)

    Borbála is a historian focusing on the research of the Holocaust in Hungary. She has multiple related degrees from ELTE & CEU, a PhD in Comparative History with a focus on the Holocaust from SZTE, and she’s a researcher of Yad Vashem.

    As an expert, Borbála brings historical accuracy and she conducts original research about the Jewish Quarter specifically for the project.

  • Dr. Gábor Orosz

    Education & Impact Measurement Lead (HU)

    Gábor is a social psychologist who worked as an intervention developer at Stanford and is currently doing research at the University of Artois.

    Gábor brings his expertise in psychological measurement and intervention design into this project, to measure how the XR experience affects empathy and learning.

  • Noémi Veronika Szakonyi

    Producer (HU)

    Noémi, a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy and SZFE, is an internationally recognized film director & producer with multiple Sundance and HBO-backed projects. Her most recent production, The Agent of Happiness premiered at Sundance 2024.

    Together with Máté, they are also the first co-producers to produce a large-scale narrative VR piece (the internationally acclaimed Missing 10 Hours) in Hungary. Noémi brings her vast creative production expertise into the project.

  • Máté Artur Vincze

    Producer (HU)

    Máté, a graduate of NYU Tisch School and SZFE, is an internationally recognized film director & producer with multiple Sundance and HBO-backed projects. His most recent production, The Agent of Happiness premiered at Sundance 2024.

    Together with Noémi, they are also the first producers to produce a large-scale narrative VR piece (the internationally acclaimed Missing 10 Hours) in Hungary. He brings his vast creative production expertise into the project.

Academy Award-winning lead actor: Géza Röhrig

Géza Röhrig is a New York-based Hungarian actor and poet. He is best known for his main role in the 2015 film Son of Saul which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, he played main role in the Tribeca Audience-award winner To Dust (with Matthew Broderick) and currently he’s shooting Terrence Malick’s new movie, The Way of The Wind.

Géza Röhrig will play the lead role in If These Streets Could Talk’s Budapest chapter, and this will be his first project shot with the combination of 3D volumetric capture and voice over.

Partners

Creating a new genre.


It is a fully interactive real-world documentary that combines the newest technologies (holograms, 3D animation, ethical deep fake, localized overlays) with research from XR storytelling, educational psychology and media theory to redefine the medium of documentary storytelling.

Academic research

We work with a multi-disciplinary team of academics to innovate – ranging from historians through social psychologists to new media experts. In addition to creating a fully innovative project, the findings will be shared with the community and published in leading scientific journals around the world.

 

#1 Interactive & Ethical representation

 

With such a sensitive topic as the Jewish experience in 20th century Europe (which includes the Holocaus)t, what role can we assign to the audience that isn’t only immersive, but also enables an accurate, sensitive, and ethical representation of the issue?

To give an utmost considerate answer, we decided to implement research into the production phase itself: In collaboration with leading academics in the field, we use a design thinking approach to test different scenarios and narrative perspectives. We’ll choose the final format based on extensive user testing of these options – and the outcome won’t only inform the project itself but the findings will be published in leading scientific journals so that they will help advance the broader interactive media community.

 

#2 Film vs. New Media for education, empathy & impact

 

To maximize the educational impact of the project, we’re designing the interactions with the help of social psychologists specialized in psychological interventions. We’ll compare the project’s effectiveness to traditional media like film. Besides implementing the principles of “wise interventions”, we will use the most rigorous testing methods (with randomized controlled trials) to assess the efficacy of our program.

In addition to creating an applied program, we will share our findings with other education, museum & interactive media professionals working on Holocaust-related programs. The study is set to be preregistered in OSF and the results are planned to get published in top-tier international scientific journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Journal of Educational Psychology, Computers in Human Behavior).

 

#3 Long-due historical research

 

Historical research of the Holocaust still has surpisingly spotty areas. Although some of the key events of the Holocaust happened in the heart of European capitals like Budapest’s, the knowledge about some of these areas and events is very limited. As part of the production phase of the project, our historian expert will conduct 3-months-long research and the results won’t only define the narrative but will be also published as academic papers.

Advancing Holocaust remembrance

  • New times need new Storytelling methods.

    According to recent studies,

    • more than 50% of the people today don’t know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

    • The number is even higher among younger adults: 63% of Gen Z lack key knowledge.

    • Several recent surveys have suggested that knowledge about the Holocaust is dwindling amongst young people, but that interest is not.

    We’re using the newest media to reach all generations.

  • Making Holocaust-representation more wholesome.

    Based on traditional representation,

    people generally perceive that the Holocaust was done 'by others', 'long ago' and 'far away'

    – whilst the reality is far more complex.

    We’ll show that it also happened in the heart of our very own cities and was also committed by our fellow citizens – so that we better understand how it happened and what the takeaways are for our present world.

Director’s statement

  • 1.

    I have a vision for XR story experiences in which you – the immersant – are one of the story's main characters. The narrative doesn’t unfold in front of you, instead, it happens to you. The story is spatial, you have a clear role, in each moment a clear goal, and those make you progress in your story, and through space. You always have choices but you never have buttons: your interactions are as smooth and natural as in real life.

    But there’s a problem: I decided to create an interactive story experience about my hometown’s Jewish quarter, that includes the events of the Holocaust – and it’s common sense in traditional Holocaust memory and education that it cannot include simulation or roleplay. So there’s a conflict between what I believe is the best immersive “storytelling” (storyliving), and between how the Holocaust is recommended to be represented. Facing this obstacle, I could have just turned away from the project and choose an easier topic. But this story was too personal and too important for me to give up on: my grandma was taken to the ghetto in Budapest, people in my family died in death camps, and even 70 years after the Holocaust, I was beaten up by neo-Nazis in the middle of Budapest.

    So I decided that I could not give up. If we keep telling stories in old ways that were developed for old media, we won’t be able to tell our most important stories to the new generations who grow up with new media. I teamed up with the leading Digital Holocaust Representation researcher, Ms. Victoria Walden (University of Sussex), with psychologists, educational and XR professionals from all around Europe, and decided that together we’ll find a new way for historical XR experiences that is both immersive and ethical at the same time.

  • 2.

    Why choose AR? I was still exploring VR at Stanford when I stumbled upon Stanford’s research on AR, which changed everything for me. The research showed that unlike other media, AR is capable of changing our mental image and understanding of real spaces. As a documentarian, I see enormous potential in this. And it’s perfectly in line with my other experiences with AR: the virtual world should never be detached from the real environment. In fact, it’s the deep connection between the real and the virtual that creates the most powerful AR/MR experiences.

    So what if we created AR story-worlds (interactive documentaries) which immerse us in the hidden histories of specific locations (e.g certain streets of a city or historic sites)? Would those change our understanding of those spaces? Can it help us better understand our history? To test it, I taught a course on this at Stanford where students created four AR experiences in four different locations on campus, revealing the hidden histories of each. And the results were more than convincing. This experience made me even more determined to create If These Streets Could Talk’s first (pilot) chapter for Budapest and for Budapest only – making it site-specific. But then, we should take all the knowledge that we gain and offer it to other creatives all around Europe so that altogether we can create local chapters in many European cities – each of them telling the local, hidden Jewish histories of their respective cities and on their respective streets. So that we won’t only renew the way we tell stories in just one city, but we will renew Holocaust-related storytelling all around Europe.

R&D + multiple chapters

Phase 1

In Phase 1, our multi-disciplinary team of experts conducts thorough R&D and creates the pilot chapter in Budapest, about the hidden history of Budapest's Jewish quarter & the Ghetto.

Phase 2

In Phase 2, we take all the immersive storytelling & psychology & ethics & tech knowledge we got out from the pilot chapter and we work together with production partners all across Europe to build local city chapters. The European city-chapters will be created by local production studios in each city (using the R&D coming out from the pilot chapter in Budapest), so we are looking for local production studios from European cities who are interested to collaborate on the project. Reach out to us if you're interested!

Let’s collaborate.

We are looking for partners across all disciplines, including:

  • Academic researchers/institutions

    • in the field of XR, AI, psychology, media and education

  • Funding boards / grant institutions all across Europe & worldwide

  • Production studios

    • who are interested in creating local European city chapters

    • or who are interested in experimenting with AR, MR, Deep fake and 3D R&D

  • Jewish organizations & museums

    • who are interested in creating local city chapters

    • or who have the potential to fund innovative projects

Contact us.

Would you like to support the project? Are you interested in creating your local chapter?

Reach out to us at hello@if-these-streets.org or send us a message below.