Project

Re·Live: Recreating Past Environments as Immersive Walkable Virtual Reality Spaces

Fluid Interfaces

Groups

What if you could go back in time to your childhood homes? Or what if you could revisit an old vacation spot that you once visited? Or even have an old memory altered to provide a different and more pleasant outcome? Taking individuals back in time to live old “phenomenological spaces” and even having them altered, could be. Re·Live is a system that reconstructs environments like one’s childhood home from old video recordings, allowing patients to travel back to a “frozen in time” location of their past using virtual reality. This system encourages users to freely explore their past, granting them the opportunity to reflect and process emotions from their past.

[Paper to appear in IEEE VR 2025 and IEEE TVCG journal]

The system uses machine learning techniques, such as photogrammetry and neural radiance fields to generate the virtual space. Given a video, the system generates a 3D mesh which is then loaded for viewing in the virtual reality application.

We conducted a user study to evaluate both the technical efficacy of our pipeline on real users' videos as well as users' experience of the reconstructed space. Our results indicate that Re·Live significantly increases people's sense of being in the past, evoking strong emotions while fostering a deep sense of presence, enabling people to more fully engage with and explore their past.