Kattenburg Virtual Memories

Visitor Journey / Interactive Installations / Research / Partners: UvA 4D Lab | UvA Visualisation Lab | Autres Direction | Total Design

Key Takeaways

Designing for memory, not just for space
Translating the intangible, personal recollections, into a physical walking journey through Kattenburg, applying our expertise in visitor journey design to content that has no fixed form.

AI as a collaborative tool, not automation
A trained prompter translated each memory into images in real time, and every result was only ever “correct” if the memory owner recognised it as their own. An approach taught by the Domestic Datastreamers and foundational for visualizing oral history.

Process as part of the outcome
Developed through an agile, research-driven collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, the project evolved through continuous iteration with historians, technologists and residents — where testing and adjusting was as much the work as the final experience.

Reconstructing history through memories, AI and mixed reality

Kattenburg, once a vibrant neighbourhood in Amsterdam, was largely demolished in the 1960s and 70s. The streets were rebuilt, but many of the personal stories that made the neighbourhood what it was disappeared from the public record. Kattenburg Virtual Memories asks a question that reaches beyond this one place: how do you responsibly and ethically visualize what was never captured in an image, and return it to the public in a way that stays true to the person whose memory it is?

Developed in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, the project combines oral history, generative AI and spatial computing to bring those lost memories back to life — and back to the neighbourhood they belong to, through a mixed reality walking tour that layers them onto the streets residents now call home.

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Historic photo of kattenburg, Kattenburg Virtual Memories

Historic photo of kattenburgerstraat, Kattenburg Virtual Memories

Historic photo of home in kattenburg, Kattenburg Virtual Memories

Historic photo of soldiers kattenburgnavalbase, Kattenburg Virtual Memories

Historic photo of gate kattenburgnavalbase, Kattenburg Virtual Memories

Historic photo of soldiers studying, Kattenburg Virtual Memories

Visualizing empathy

Conveying oral history to a general audience risks trading accuracy for empathy. As designers, we are rarely the owner of the story, so how could we know what it should look like?

The Synthetic Memories method by Domestic Data Streamers provides a solution: instead of deciding what is correct, you interview the memory owner while visualizing with specialised GenAI models, and the memory owner decides when an image feels true, not accurate, but true. Deliberately avoiding high-res, clear visualisations keeps the emphasis on feeling.

Interviewing former residents of Kattenburg this way taught us what made the area unique, and having a visual paired with each story let us move safely into other media, like mixed reality, without deciding for ourselves how to create empathy with the public.

This method laid the foundation for the project — later extended from 2D visuals into 3D, and further into using VR agents to generate entire environments directly from memory.

Synthetic memory visual, method, Kattenburg Virtual Memories

Blending history with the present

A unique strength of Mixed Reality (MR) is the way it blends the virtual and the real. This has proven valuable in many existing history projects — but most MR experiences remain tied to a single object or “anchor.” By using state-of-the-art Visual Positioning Systems (VPS), the same technology behind autonomous drones, we could go further: not just layering history onto one object, but guiding visitors on a walking tour through the entire neighbourhood, offering a full perspective on how the area was experienced before its demolition around 1965.

Was has happend so far:

4 Sep ’25

Start
The first meeting after the funding by ClickNL was honored to our consortium of; UvA 4D Lab, UvA Visualisation Lab, Autres Direction and Total Design.
Synthetic Memories workshop

Before any interview took place, the Domestic Data Streamers taught us their Synthetic Memories method during a two day workshop. It surfaced the principle that would guide everything after: a memory doesn’t need to be factually correct, only recognised by the person who owns it. The role of the prompter, translating spoken memory into image without steering it, proved as delicate as the role of the interviewer. This became the foundation the rest of the project was built on.

27 - 28 Oct ’26
20 Nov ’25

Interviews (former) Citizens

Thanks to Boudewijn, we gained access to former residents of Kattenburg. Their memories gave us a new perspective on this very known neighboorhood . Steven de Vries remembered the Marine base’s boundary wall as impossibly high, a childhood impression that outlived the wall’s actual, modest height. Jos Dekker, one of the first to move into the rebuilt neighbourhood, recalled looking out over an empty sand plain that stretched all the way to the train tracks, a view that no longer exists in any form but memory. These are the details a factual reconstruction alone could never hold.
Interviews Military

Kattenburg’s history runs through the Marine base that once stood there, and through Floribert’s own research into that history, we were able to speak with several of his participants. The same base, it turned out, lived differently in different memories: for some, simply home; for others, a place with its own emotional weather; one recalled the sun always shining on the way out through the gates, and grey skies waiting on the way back in. Emotional details an differences like these are what shape a place beyond the factual reconstruction and also showed an important insight regarding oral history; everyone’s perspective is different but all are true

09 Jan ’26
30 May ’26

First public test

An early iPad prototype, without any interview content yet, let visitors hold up a screen and see part of old Kattenburg layered onto the neighbourhood as it stands today. Even stripped down to just this, the response was immediate: people paused, pointed, traced the outlines of houses that hadn’t existed in decades. It confirmed something simple and important, that seeing the past standing in the present is powerful on its own, before a single memory is added.
Project Finish

The finale, where the completed mixed reality walking tour will be presented to the public, is still taking shape. More details will follow on our LinkedIn page as the date approaches.

02 Oct ’26