May 23, 2026

On the night of May 23, 2026, the Its-Story team took part in the 22nd Nuit européenne des musées at the Mémorial de l'internement et de la déportation – Camp de Royallieu, presenting the project's mixed-reality prototypes to the public.

Across the evening, eight thirty-minute sessions welcomed up to six visitors at a time. Each session opened with a short introduction to the project and the headset, followed by one or two scenarios, including the roll call scenario, which uses stylized low-poly characters and dissolving figures as metaphors of dehumanization, before closing on a montage of historical photographs of real Royallieu deportees with diverse profiles.

A debrief with the research team followed every session. The feedback was rich, and strikingly contradictory. A few visitors read the scenario as genuinely poetic and understood the abstract sequence in which only the sound of internees' footsteps walks toward the railway station; most did not grasp this passage, which we will redesign (mist and footprints lighting up along the path to the station).

The range of postures observed maps onto the typology of museum visitor reception proposed by Belaën (2002, 2005). The project explicitly aims for résonance (resonance) allowing historical comprehension, perspective-taking, and affective connection, while seeking to avoid submersion (overwhelming immersion), which would blunt understanding and push the experience into an over-emotional register ill-suited to a subject of this gravity, particularly for visitors with a personal connection to the history.

Several visitors clearly entered into résonance, deeply moved without losing critical distance, including two children of resistance fighters (one whose father had been deported to Buchenwald) who judged the tool meaningful and important. Others adopted distanciation critique (critical distance), engaging while analysing the design choices. A subset expressed banalisation (trivialisation), expecting photorealistic characters and explicit depictions of violence and suffering, precisely what the project chooses not to show. A single visitor displayed clear rejet (rejection), judging the environment of poor quality and disappointing; we suspect this stems from a mismatch with the visual standards of video games and animated films, and from a misunderstanding of the technical constraints of standalone real-time mixed-reality headsets. The strong emotional responses we observed corresponded to résonance rather than submersion: visitors were genuinely touched without being overwhelmed.

Several visitors had taken the Memorial's guided tour earlier in the evening and reported that the mixed-reality experience worked as a strong complement to it, helping them imagine the living conditions in the camp more concretely.

These first encounters with a broad public, their enthusiasm, their disagreements, their emotions, already provide valuable material for the next iterations of the prototypes.

Belaën, F. (2002). L'expérience de visite dans les expositions scientifiques et techniques à scénographie d'immersion, thèse de doctorat, Université de Bourgogne. — Belaën, F. (2005). « L'immersion dans les musées de science : médiation ou séduction ? », Culture & Musées.

March 26, 2026

On March 26, 2026, the Its-Story consortium welcomed its newly constituted Scientific Advisory Board for its first meeting, hosted once again at the Mémorial de l'internement et de la déportation – Camp de Royallieu.

The Board provides the project with scientific, methodological, and ethical guidance throughout its four-year duration. Three meetings are planned: this inaugural session, dedicated to presenting the project and its initial directions, will be followed by two further meetings coupled with scientific workshops in which Board members will be invited to contribute as speakers or panelists.

The Board brings together internationally recognized experts whose complementary perspectives are essential to a project at the crossroads of history, computer science, cognitive science, ethics, and museography:

• Deborah Barton (Université de Montréal) — historian
• Pierre-Antoine Chardel (IMT) - philosopher, digital ethics
• Marine Dudziak-Vannier (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum) - cultural projects manager and educator
• Guillaume Gronier (Henri-Tudor Research Centre, Luxembourg) - UX and psychometrics
• Nadège Ragaru (Sciences Po) - historian
• Nicolas Szilas (TECFA, Université de Genève) - interactive narration
• Laurent Veray (IRCAV, Sorbonne Nouvelle) - film historian, mediation, staging

The day opened with a guided visit of the Memorial, followed by a presentation of the project's objectives, partnership, and research questions, and an overview of each partner's planned contributions.

The afternoon was devoted to live mixed-reality demonstrations of the first prototypes — including several stylistic and narrative variations (narrative without interaction, realistic and stylized characters, metaphorical and focalized treatments), followed by an in-depth collective discussion.

The exchanges were demanding, rich, and constructive. Board members confirmed the relevance and importance of the project, while raising key questions about visitor profiling, the evaluation of historical understanding and empathy, the place of fiction and metaphor in memory work, and the balance between materiality and abstraction. We leave this first meeting with a clear sense of the scientific challenges ahead, and with the engaged support of an advisory board fully invested in the journey.

March 2026

UTC's Mois de l'Égalité 2026, dedicated this year to women in science, was spearheaded by Marie-Hélène Abel — UTC's Equality referent, former head of the Computer Science department, and a long-standing advocate for the cause. As part of the programme, the Its-Story team welcomed middle school students from Ressons-sur-Matz and Nogent-sur-Oise for a day at the UTC innovation centre. Together with Indira Thouvenin and Domitile Lourdeaux (Heudiasyc), the students were introduced to computer science and immersive technologies through one of the project's demonstrators: the long scenario on the Jewish internees of the “rafle des notables” — the December 1941 roundup that brought hundreds of French Jewish notables to the Royallieu camp.

The most striking moment of the session was unplanned. Several young participants, with a quiet sense of respect and recollection, gathered around the virtual stove at the heart of the scene and lingered there, reporting that they could feel its warmth — even though no physical heat source was present. The narration of the scene tells visitors that the internees had only enough wood to light the stove a few hours a day, and that it warmed their bodies as much as their spirits. Feeling that warmth gave the words immediate, embodied weight.

Because the experience runs in mixed reality, each participant sees the others alongside them in the same virtual space, which sustains a real sense of co-presence. Although they were standing in a UTC platform room rather than an actual camp dormitory, the students fully projected themselves into the scene — a striking illustration of what embodied, shared immersion can offer to memory work with younger audiences.

Full programme of UTC's Mois de l'Égalité 2026

January 22, 2025

The Its-Story consortium gathered for its official kickoff at the Mémorial de l'internement et de la déportation – Camp de Royallieu in Compiègne, bringing together all partners: Heudiasyc, COSTECH, Centre Borelli, CHS (Centre d'Histoire Sociale des mondes contemporains), the Mémorial de l'internement et de la déportation – Camp de Royallieu, and Excurio.

The setting itself set the tone. The meeting room had once served as a dormitory for internees, and the lingering cold gave participants an immediate, embodied sense of the conditions endured there, a sobering reminder of why this project matters.

The day was devoted to presenting the project's overall objectives, followed by introductions from each partner outlining their expertise and planned contributions. We also demonstrated the first prototypes developed at UTC through student projects and the MemoReal project, the Hauts-de-France-funded precursor that paved the way for Its-Story.

Beyond the scientific agenda, the meeting was a first step in building a shared working culture across disciplines spanning computer science, cognitive science, history, and immersive media production. The enthusiasm in the room was tangible, and we are genuinely excited to embark on this four-year journey together.