If These Streets Could Talk

If These Streets Could Talk’s aim is to create a 20-30 minutes-long immersive AR experience on the streets of Budapest’s former Jewish District that brings the era and the stories of the 1945 ghetto to life. It’s an immersive, active storyliving experience where the participant chooses a goal (either to escape or to find a hiding place – in other words: to survive) and navigates the streets of the current Budapest as if they were in the 1945 Ghetto, with the help of localized overlays and holograms, through a series of interactions with documented events and people from the era. As the immersant works their way forward to survive in the ghetto, they live through a piece of history of that particular space, and by that, they bring the wiped-out history of the district back to life.

If These Streets Could Talk is more than an XR experience about Budapest’s ghetto. It’s a project that aims to invent interactive location-based immersive storyliving methods and best practices that can be easily adapted to other locations and histories in the world. Polish partners already expressed interest in creating a chapter in the Warsaw Ghetto, but the world owes us spatial experiences telling the Native American history in the U.S., Armenian history of places in Turkey, etc. I’m starting the work with my own community: the Eastern European jews – focusing on their struggles as well as on the Righteous non-Jews who risked their own lives to try saving them.