Recreating Personal Experience with Immersive Moments

Nabila Chowdhury2 Anna Offenwanger1, Fanny Chevalier2 Theophanis Tsandilas1, Ishtiaque Ahmed2

1 Universite Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Inria 2 University of Toronto

Immersive experiences can help bridge cultural divides through perspective taking, but typically must be authored by people with programming expertise. We present Moments, a system for non-experts to create and share immersive narratives of personal experiences, specifically focusing on experiences of migration. The author can recreate personal contexts through importing surround imagery, 2D and 3D content, and ambient audio. These contexts can be linked together with teleporters, enabling narrative transitions. The author integrates their subjective experience through audio annotation and the emphasis of parts of the surround imagery via blurring, focusing, and warping. This work demonstrates the Moments authoring system and a small gallery of narratives authored in the tool.

To cite: TBD




Demo Video





Gallery

We here present a Gallery of stories authored in the system. These stories can be experienced by downloading the associated zip file and importing it into Moments. Please see https://github.com/offenwanger/moments for the code to run Moments on your machine.

Canadian German Christmas 🔽

This story starts in the kitchen where the author describes how their different Christmas traditions are influenced by their roots.

Snow is an integral part of Christmas for the author, so they reminise about snow at christmas time over the years.

Here the author describes Christmas eve.

Moving Home as a Child🔽

This story starts at the authors old home. They replicate how it was from their memory by using pictures of found on the internet, for example of a cherry tree that they add to the backyard or a specific brand of car they used to have.

The author recreates a scene from their memory of hiding among the corn stalks in the Garden. They include a model of a tree that's like the one they used to climb in the garden of thier old home.

Here the author shows a scene of their new home. The teleporter to the right brings the author to another scene with reminiscences about the move.

Pohela Boishakh in Toronto and Bangladesh🔽

The narrative starts on a street in a large Canadian city which Bangladeshi people decorate for the celebration. 2D images show the decorations and food that are found at the festival.

Viewers transition to Bangledesh where moment captures how the people prepare the roads and buildings with designs for the celebration.

On early morning of Pohela Boishakh people gather with big decorations for a rally. To set the tone of the festivities, this moment includes music from the festival.

Traveling Mood Data 🔽

This visualization demonstrates the inclusion of abstract data into a narrative of migration. Here we see the authors full mood dataset. Data entries are a single numeric entry from 1-5 (1 very bad mood, 5 very good mood), positioned around the circle based on entry date. The circle beginning and end of the set is marked by a white marker, the start being fall of 2021, the end early 2023, new years by a black marker.

Each triangle represents a mood entry. Bright red is a rating of 1, dull red is 2, grey is 3, light blue 4, deep blue 5.

The mood data is split across the various places the author has lived. Teleporters are attached to the end of each segment to transition the viewer with the author as they travel during this period.