Recreating Personal Experience with Immersive Moments

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

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

Migration often fragments cultural heritage, distributing it across geographies and generations. While immersive experiences have the potential to bridge these cultural divides, current immersive tools require technical expertise that excludes many migrants from narrating their own stories. We present MomentsVR, an accessible authoring system that empowers migrants to create and share immersive narratives of their personal experiences. Through importing surround imagery, 2D and 3D content, and ambient audio, users can reconstruct meaningful places and narratives, linking them with teleporters for fluid narrative transitions. The system also supports audio annotations and visual emphasis techniques, such as blurring, focusing and warping to highlight subjective experiences. Our work showcases MomentsVR as a means of democratizing immersive storytelling, allowing migrants to curate, share, and reimagine their cultural experiences across immersive spaces.

To cite: Nabila Chowdhury, Anna Offenwanger, Theophanis Tsandilas, Fanny Chevalier, and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed. 2025. MomentsVR: Accessible Immersive Spaces for Authoring Personal Narration. In Companion of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW Companion ’25), October 18–22, 2025, Bergen, Norway. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715070.3749270




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 instructions.

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.

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.

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.

Markets in France and Canada 🔽

This visualization makes heavy use of blurring to conceal parts of the surround image that do not match with memory, due to the surround image having been taken at a different time than the Market photos.

Using the color brush tool, the French market location is augmented with snow.

Ambient christmas music helps give the market the feel of Canadian Christmas.

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.