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.