From Watching to Entering: A VR Approach to Cinematic Storytelling as Digital Heritage

With new technologies, heritage no longer exists only in the physical world but also takes meaningful form in the digital realm. For instance, Notre Dame de Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity and the depiction of Lai Yuen in Out of the Dark (1995) let audiences experience places that have changed or disappeared. These cases show films that contain and record cultural heritage in their settings and stories, while this paper further argues that cinema itself as a narrative and aesthetic practice can be understood as a form of intangible cultural heritage in its own right. Cinema can represent a vital form of intangible cultural heritage, shaping collective memory and storytelling practices across generations. Scholars have argued that heritage extends beyond monuments or artifacts to include narratives, performance, and cultural expressions that encapsulate identity and meaning [Wang et al. 2025; Ye et al. 2025]. From this perspective, films can be considered cultural memory objects that preserve aesthetic, social, and narrative heritage contributing to communal cultural identity. Yet engagement with films as heritage remains largely passive, confined to spectatorship and textual analysis [Holly 2023]. This paper introduces CineSim VR, a virtual reality platform that reframes iconic movie scenes as immersive environments and treats these scenes as compact units through which cinematic memory, aesthetics, and cultural identities are transmitted and re-experienced. CineSim VR enables users to enter, navigate, and reinterpret cinematic storytelling from multiple perspectives. By situating films within the discourse of digital heritage, CineSim VR demonstrates how cinema itself, whether grounded in historical locations or entirely fictional, can be experienced as cultural memory in interactive form. The system, originally conceived and developed by the authors in Unreal Engine, provides a VR environment where users can embody different vantage points within selected film scenes, fostering narrative understanding and heritage appreciation. A pilot study with 25 undergraduate and postgraduate students used questionnaires and focus groups to evaluate user experience. Findings indicate strong engagement, heightened presence, and recognition of cinema’s heritage value through immersive exploration, showing how VR can transform cinematic traditions into participatory cultural experiences.