The poster presentation has a physical and a virtual component. The traditional poster summarizes intellectual, creative, and technological approaches to crafting the VR experience. It details how South Florida’s demographics inspired this effort, in what ways the university and the community collaborated to gather source material, and through which stages the three-dimensional reconstruction process progressed. Highlighting student involvement throughout the project, it also discusses how similar ventures may be implemented in other academic settings. The virtual component of this presentation, meanwhile, invites visitors to explore the VR prototype for themselves. Built with the aid of the Spoke VR/AR authoring tool and Mozilla Hubs, this virtual experience permits real-time social interactions for up to twenty-five visitors at a time via computers, smartphones, and tablets.
The VR prototype serves as the foundation of a study on the benefits of experiential history for collective memory and intergenerational storytelling. Generally, immersive and embodied experiences present new aspects of oral history as a process. The Social VR platform assumes the role of an interlocutor that provides visual and aural information to which study participants respond by recounting and exchanging memories. Thus, it generates data on the use of digitally recreated environments to further understandings of how participants can be co-constructors and actors in immersive historical settings. Focusing on the exile experiences of Miami-Dade County’s vast Cuban-American community, this VR project invites seniors of Cuban descent to relive everyday-life episodes of their childhood and adolescence. The platform enables virtual visitors to revisit city streets and sites of significance as avatars of their younger selves and in the company of friends and family. The study generates new insights from recollections and interactions between participants who explore the virtual locales. Investigating the interplay between collective and individual memories, it aspires to clarify how experiential history can facilitate new forms of intergenerational oral history.