Cognitive Representations and Personal Experiences of COVID-19 Using Social Virtual Reality

How were you affected by the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020? Answers to this question can capture and report unique and shared experiences as a community-focused storytelling device. Storytelling is how we make sense of the world around us (Lambert, 2013). Storytelling can help bring to light the tales of specific persons within different communities, both big and small. It can also provide a platform for expressing a sense of sameness instead of highlighting individual differences, where the stories of the individual are as important as the collective narrative. Thus, historically, storytelling has been practiced to create strong communities, create a conduit for positive consciousness, and build the individuals' self-esteem within—the staples of healthy living (Lambert, 2013). But how does digital storytelling, as a contemporary media production form, engage storytellers and their audiences in this unique context?

In this study, we utilized a specific type of virtual environment (VE)—a photogrammetrically reconstructed space—to explore how individuals represent and share their experiences of the pandemic within a social VR platform. Photogrammetric VEs offer a realistic and immersive representation of physical spaces, enabling participants to relive and recount their experiences with a heightened sense of presence. By integrating these highly detailed, spatially accurate 3D environments with the interactive and communal features of social VR, we aimed to facilitate a novel form of digital storytelling that was both personal and collective. Therefore, we aimed to employ social VR as a storytelling medium and a tool for understanding and analyzing the nuanced psychological and social phenomena emerging during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Digital storytelling, in the context of this research, is defined as the practice of using digital multimedia tools—such as images, audio, and video within a VR environment—to narrate personal experiences, particularly those related to the COVID-19 pandemic. While digital storytelling can encompass various methods, including interactive narratives, nonlinear stories, and collective storytelling, our study focuses on immersive digital storytelling within photogrammetrically reconstructed virtual environments.

Digital storytelling allows people to use modern technology to share aspects of their lives through unique narratives and reports on an individual or group's subjective experiences. Digital storytelling has emerged as a powerful narrative tool that can engage both storytellers and their audiences in new and exciting ways and various contexts, including education (Passig et al., 2016; Wu & Chen, 2020), migration (Alexandra, 2008), healthcare (Guse et al., 2013), religious studies (Hess, 2014), and tourism (Qiongli, 2006). To further explore this area of research, focus can be made on emergent digital platforms for storytelling to demonstrate how co-creative arts practices can help support online community-building and share lockdown experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The immersive nature of VR provides a unique platform for storytelling, where the participants are not just recounting their experiences but are also reliving them in a controlled and reconstructed virtual space. This approach facilitates a profound exploration of narrative, memory, and emotion, offering insights into how individuals process and articulate their experiences during unprecedented times. Thus, we uncover how VR can capture and convey complex human experiences, contributing to our understanding of narrative construction, cognitive representation, and emotional expression in digital realms.

Traditionally, cognitive representations are used in co-creative arts practice and refer to using artistic methods and creative expressions to represent and communicate cognitive or mental aspects of human experiences, thoughts, and emotions (Zeilig et al., 2018). It involves translating abstract concepts and subjective experiences into tangible forms that others can share, understand, and interpret (Tudor, 2019). The artist and participant engage in a relationship where the artist has a leading role as a facilitator of the process while being carefully directed by the participant to realize their vision. In co-creative arts practice, this process often involves collaboration and active participation from multiple individuals, including artists, storytellers, and audience members (Winnicott, 1991). This approach to co-creation has been reported to support integrating life events into one's life narrative (Weeseman et al., 2022).

In the context of this study, the term cognitive representation refers to an individual's unique mental representation of external stimuli or information relating to the pandemic. This concept is crucial when exploring how individuals process, recall, and narrate their experiences, particularly in a digital storytelling framework. While storytelling traditionally involves conveying narratives that may stem from one's cognitive representations, in VR, these representations gain a tangible form, allowing for a nuanced exploration of personal narratives. Our digital storytelling approach examines how individuals' cognitive representations of their pandemic experiences are manifested and reinterpreted within the immersive social VR environment. The VR medium offers a unique opportunity to recount a story and visually and spatially reconstruct the environment or context of that narrative, thus blurring the lines between the cognitive representation and the storytelling process itself.

This unique methodology facilitates participants in reflecting on the complex circumstances that emerged in the 2020 pandemic, reimagining the impact of COVID-19, interrogating twenty-first-century co-creative and collaborative artistic practices, and exploring collective resilience and collegiality. As such, a first-person plural storytelling approach can be proscribed for this purpose, where individuals can speak as themselves and of their personal experiences (“I”) and communicate with the support of the collective community voice (“We”). This raises new questions about how we provide personal insights and reveal the effects of COVID-19 on a community level. Suppose this first-person storytelling style (Lambert, 2013) can be delivered within a 3D place-based narrative context. Can it create an additional connection with the author's voice and the collective community to which they belong? This situational narrative and 3D media connection were particularly relevant while cases of COVID-19 ebbed and flowed in the last quarter of 2020 and early 2021.

Therefore, to account for the phenomenon of cognitive representation in our study, we consider the stories shared by participants within the VR environment not merely as retellings but as re-enactments or re-creations of their mental representations. These virtual re-creations provide insights into how participants perceive, interpret, and assign meaning to their experiences of the COVID-19 lockdown. By analyzing these cognitive representations made tangible in the VR setting, we can glean a deeper understanding of the personal and collective impact of the pandemic, showcasing the potent intersection of cognitive psychology and digital storytelling in VR. We aim to elucidate the complex interplay between individual cognition and narrative expression. We offer a novel perspective on how personal and shared experiences of significant events are constructed and communicated within virtual spaces.

While digital storytelling and the co-creation of cognitive representations have a long and varied history, we offer a unique combinational approach to include storytellers in a bottom-up community-based co-creative practice that collects multimodal data and constructs 3D immersive IVs as cognitive representations for VR (Dawkins & Young, 2020a). VR provides an immersive platform for artists and creators to explore and express their cognitive representations innovatively. VR technology presents users with computer-generated experiences that simulate physical presence in natural or imaginary environments (Van Kerrebroeck et al., 2017). It allows users to interact with computer-generated environments that simulate physical presence in natural or imaginary spaces, offering a powerful creative expression and storytelling medium. In VR, computer-generated environments accommodate and simulate people, objects, and other sensory experiences (Freeman et al., 2017). But how do VR technology and cognitive 3D representations in VR impact the storytelling experience and the conveyance of narrative potential based on personally meaningful real-world locations?

In co-creative arts practice, VR can create virtual worlds and experiences that represent the cognitive aspects of human experiences, thoughts, emotions, and memories. Artists and creators can use VR to build virtual art galleries and exhibitions that showcase their cognitive representations through interactive artworks. Users can navigate through the virtual space, experiencing and engaging with the art in a more immersive manner (Widjono, 2020). Storytelling in VR allows creators to present narratives and experiences representing cognitive aspects of personal stories, cultural tales, or abstract concepts. Users can participate actively in the narrative, becoming part of the story and exploring the cognitive representations within the virtual environment (Shin, 2018). VR platforms have enabled artists and creators to collaborate remotely on co-creative projects, where they can collectively represent their cognitive experiences and ideas within a shared virtual space (Greenwald et al., 2017; Siau et al., 2010).

Our study introduces a different approach to digital storytelling by integrating VR with photogrammetrically reconstructed VEs, enabling participants to narrate their COVID-19 experiences within a spatially accurate representation of significant places from their lives during the pandemic.

This approach is distinctive for several reasons. Unlike traditional digital storytelling, which might rely on text, audio, or conventional video, our method utilizes photogrammetry to create highly detailed 3D replicas of real-world locations (Dawkins & Young, 2020a). When these replicas are experienced within a VR setting, they provide an unparalleled sense of presence and immersion, allowing users to navigate and interact with a space that holds personal significance. Therefore, we place the participants at the center of the narrative process, allowing them to lead the storytelling within the VR environment. This participatory method contrasts with more passive forms of story consumption, engaging individuals actively in recounting and reliving their experiences.

Moreover, by situating personal narratives within a contextually relevant and spatially accurate environment, our approach enhances the emotional and cognitive resonance of the storytelling experience. Participants are not just recalling their stories; they are re-experiencing them, which can provide deeper insights into their perceptions and reactions during the pandemic. This sense of presence presents novel research avenues by merging qualitative storytelling with quantitative spatial analysis, allowing for a multifaceted exploration of how environments influence and reflect personal narratives during significant global events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Our presented methodology stands out for its ability to create a deep, participant-driven, and contextually enriched narrative experience, offering valuable insights into the human experience during the pandemic.

At the beginning of the presented project, it was hypothesized that a varied cohort of participants could support existing theories about the lockdown and identify lesser-known thematic items of personal significance, with examples of significant life events or developing new and existing relationships. To gather this data, we sought to identify cognitive representations of place during the COVID-19 pandemic using open-source photogrammetry software and cross-platform social VR. We then aimed to use these virtual places as a backdrop for exploring the impact of the pandemic on our cohort's lives using a qualitative approach that could provide detailed examinations of personal lived experiences. This idiographic approach reveals how individuals made sense of a global pandemic. They focus on how they experienced the lockdown through detailed examinations of personal experiences.

Against this backdrop, our study examines lived experiences during challenging times by applying VR technology as a platform to express the lockdown's emotional impact. This goal was to be achieved by exploring the affordances of VR technology in a storytelling context. First, we explore place as a cognitive representation of the spaces occupied or longed for during the lockdown. Secondly, we conduct remote storytelling exercises in these representations of place. We use these digital environs as a springboard to reveal insights concerning the pandemic and evoke important thematic substance of these stories. Thus, we question how the affordances of VR technology facilitate the exploration of the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on people's lives and evoke important thematic substance in their stories.

Throughout Sections 1 to 1.4, we have presented several questions concerning the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on personal experiences and the role of digital storytelling in VR. These questions aim to dissect the multifaceted nature of personal narratives and the technological mediation of such narratives in a pandemic context. Here, we systematize these formative research questions and rationalize how they inform our primary research question and hypotheses:

• RQ1: How can individuals utilize digital storytelling within VR to articulate and process their pandemic experiences?

• RQ2: In what ways do photogrammetrically reconstructed VEs influence participants' storytelling and narrative engagement?

• RQ3: How do personal narratives within VR contribute to our understanding of the pandemic's psychological and social impact?

Our primary research question is derived from these consolidated inquiries:

• PRQ: In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, how does digital storytelling in VR environments influence the articulation and perception of personal experiences?

Building on the primary research question, we propose the following hypotheses:

• H1: Digital storytelling in VR, particularly within photogrammetrically reconstructed environments, enables individuals to articulate complex pandemic-related experiences, providing insights into their cognitive and emotional processing of the event.

• H2: Engagement with personal narratives in VR contributes to a deeper understanding of the pandemic's psychological and social impact, revealing nuanced aspects of individual and collective experiences.

These hypotheses focus on how VR storytelling affects the perception and articulation of experiences and the broader implications for understanding the pandemic's impact.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses known to cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) (CDCP, 2020; WHO, 2022). These viruses are zoonotic, meaning they can be transmitted between animals and humans (WHO, 2022). In late 2019, a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, China, leading to the disease COVID-19. Rapidly spreading across the globe, this virus instigated an unprecedented public health crisis, declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020 (WHO, 2020).

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been profound, affecting millions of lives, overwhelming healthcare systems, and triggering widespread social and economic disruption. Research utilizing conventional quantitative methods has extensively documented the pandemic's multifaceted impacts, including its implications on health systems, economic stability, and the well-being of communities. Notably, issues of poverty (Sannigrahi et al., 2020), disability (Broda et al., 2024), and the experiences of young people (Wu et al., 2022) have been brought into sharp focus, highlighting the pandemic's disproportionate effects on these vulnerable groups. This recent pandemic underscores the critical need to understand how societies respond to and are affected by such global health emergencies, providing the impetus for our study (NIAID, 2022).

Living during the COVID-19 pandemic meant experiencing a global health emergency and prolonged psychological stress. Notably, the pandemic presented three psychological dilemmas: the constant pressure of avoiding or living with the disease, the disappearance or augmentation of familiar places, and the relative sense of community these changes brought with them (Riva & Wiederhold, 2020). The impact of such stress on the general population and how it affected how we lived, enjoyed our hobbies, studied, played sports, and socialized will be the focus of much research in the coming years.

A school of thought advocates the role of art within community-based practices as having a therapeutic function. This subject area represents a deep and expansive pool of psychosocial and aesthetic theory that encompasses conflict resolution in terms of the culture (LeBaron, 2003), the classroom (Gibbons, 2010), post-traumatic stress reconciliation (Kip et al., 2013), social inclusion (Karkou & Glasman, 2004), and empathy (Young et al., 2021). In parallel to the theory, various practice-based creative arts methodologies exist for coping with trauma types, including visual arts (Chapman et al., 2001) and performance practices (O'Brien et al., 2014). A consistent characteristic across the remit of all these community-based programs is art's ability and social function to empower and give a voice to otherwise silenced, marginalized, isolated, or oppressed individuals and collectives. Within the category of social inclusion is the apprehension of the exclusive effects of the continually advancing (in terms of sophistication and accessibility) technologies of representation and the exclusion of everyday people from processes of cultural content creation, which Stiegler describes as symbolic misery (Stiegler, 2014, 2015).

VR facilitates the creation of infinite realities (Blascovich & Bailenson, 2011) and is defined by its ability to convey a sense of presence that promotes immersion in an activity (Jerald, 2015). Unlike two-dimensional linear media, such as traditional text, film, or music, engagement within VR encourages exploration and discovery through immersion (Bailenson, 2018). With the recent re-emergence and growing popularity of VR (Evans, 2018; Siriborvornratanakul, 2016), it is possible to deliver site-specific or place-based experiences to larger audiences without traveling physically (Klippel et al., 2020), a requirement for most augmented reality (AR) experiences (Siriborvornratanakul, 2019).

Place refers to spatial locations that solicit immediate emotional attention and provide a form of cathartic reassurance (Dawkins & Young, 2020a; Silk, 1999; Tuan, 1977). Social VR software can deliver computer-generated spaces where users can talk, watch videos, and play remotely (Constine, 2015). These platforms have become popular using advanced features such as synchronous voice chat, heightened feelings of presence and embodiment, real-time movement, and custom avatars (Hayden, 2020). Therefore, unique experiences can be shared and discussed with others through activities organized by embodied place-based virtual field trips via social VR and storytelling. Virtual field trips can be essential in supporting and qualitatively enhancing fieldwork (Young et al., 2021) and empowering the financially or physically disadvantaged (Broda et al., 2024; Ghosh et al., 2024; Stainfield et al., 2000).

The main goal of storytelling in VR is to tell a story that will elicit emotions and affect action (Shin, 2017). Immersive VR experiences induce presence, enabling users to experience the feeling of being in another location. However, research suggests that immersion does not necessarily enhance the users' sense of engagement or satisfaction (Hamari et al., 2016; Trentini, 2015). Empathy and embodied cognition are two concepts frequently arising in VR and storytelling discussions (Shin & Biocca, 2018; Young et al., 2021). Empathizing during storytelling can help to combine virtual and physical reality, thus producing stronger feelings of presence, embodiment, and embodied cognition based on the stories (Beadle et al., 2012; Kilteni et al., 2012). It is argued that immersion comes from user cognition rather than from technology (Shin, 2016). However, the fidelity of the interaction can influence how uncanny the exchange is regarding various human performance measures such as presence, flow, empathy, and embodiment (McMahan et al., 2016). Still, it can be redefined through user responses (Shin, 2018), such as sense-making and intention (Reinhard & Dervin, 2012). The user actively participates in adopting, consuming, and experiencing stories, which has implications for heuristic-based usability and cognition-evaluation methods (Bailey et al., 2016).

When using VR, the participant actively engages with what is going on rather than being passive recipients (Dalgarno & Lee, 2010). Understanding the role of the implicit affordances of VR technology in providing access to VEs is essential to how our storytelling can be achieved using social VR. User modeling has confirmed that the affordances of presence and immersion are linked to empathy and embodied cognition (Shin, 2017). Research suggests that experiencing presence in AR games correlates positively to well-being outcomes (Kosa & Uysal, 2022), with considerable research interest in the positive and negative impact of usage in terms of physical (Peng et al., 2022) and mental health (Orosz et al., 2018). Furthermore, immersion and imagination via VR-mediated content positively impact the VR system's perceived usefulness and facilitate ease of use (Huang et al., 2016). These factors are crucial to understanding how people experience the digital world and, more importantly, the role of cognition in the experience of VR (Rienties et al., 2016).

Our methodological approach to digital storytelling in VR has evolved from previous work on 3D co-creation practices, outlining the sharing of multisensory experiences of place through community-generated digital content and multimodal interaction (Dawkins & Young, 2020a). This methodology provided the shortest and most direct method to empower individual storytellers to construct personally meaningful virtual places to share their experiences. Moreover, they could participate in the examination of their lived experiences and meaning-making activities to focus their thoughts when reconstructing their selected locations. Therefore, participants were provided with added satisfaction concerning their input into the creative experience (Dawkins & Young, 2020b). Furthermore, our storytellers' experiences were empowered via creative and constructivist components, developing a collective sense of agency for the storytellers. By providing a working methodology, our virtual field trip project aimed to provide a supportive environment that encouraged amateur creatives to express themselves through personally meaningful VR media, thereby nurturing the establishment of a storytelling community through grassroots, bottom-up-driven content.

We apply an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to describe the ordinary meaning of lived experiences of the pandemic. This description consists of what participants experienced and how they experienced it (Moustakas, 1994). IPA is a popular approach to research in health psychology and how illnesses are experienced (Smith, 1996, 2011). Our primary research question was to understand the pandemic's experience (phenomenology) and how our participants understood it (interpretation). This methodological approach was taken to garner meaning from the participant's attempts to make sense of their own experiences, one of inquiry and meaning-making (Reid et al., 2005). This bottom-up approach to data collection and analysis was taken to generate thematic codes from the multimodal data rather than using a pre-existing theory to test a hypothesis. This combination of modalities provided a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon under investigation, as both data types complemented each other. Our participants were in a unique situation where they could identify the places and core themes that mattered to them and convey the meaning of these places and themes during the pandemic.

On the 26th of February 2020, the SARS-Cornavirus -2 RNA was detected via a Nasal and Throat Swab (NTS) on the island of Ireland (Perumal et al., 2020). Some of the highest case counts (per 100,000 population) were observed in the Republic of Ireland (ROI), along with a moderate level of morbidity (Sannigrahi et al., 2020). The ROI's experience with the COVID-19 pandemic offers a distinct context for our study, given its unique public health response, societal impacts, and the government's approach to lockdown measures. Unlike a broad-brush approach to understanding the pandemic's effects, examining the experiences within the ROI provides nuanced insights into the interplay between public health policies, community resilience, and individual experiences during the pandemic.

Early and stringent lockdowns, a robust public health messaging campaign, and a community-oriented approach to compliance and solidarity characterized ROI's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While reflecting broader global strategies, these measures were tailored to the Irish's specific social, demographic, and geographic context. The Irish government's emphasis on community engagement and collective responsibility was pivotal in shaping the public's adherence to restrictions, influencing individual and collective experiences during the lockdown.

This backdrop is particularly relevant to our study as it situates the participants' experiences within a specific national narrative. It provides a deeper understanding of how localized responses to the pandemic influenced personal narratives and cognitive representations. The focus on ROI does not merely signify the study's geographic location. Still, it underscores the importance of contextual factors in shaping the pandemic's lived experiences, which are central to our investigation of digital storytelling in VR.

To begin exploring and unpacking the impact of COVID-19, we invited members of the public to participate via a general call through the project's social media network. With approval from the university's Research Ethics Committee, data were collected between January to October 2021. At this time, our volunteers were provided with a formal Research Information Sheet and Consent Form. Sixteen participants volunteered for the study; however, five could not complete the world-building process due to scheduling conflicts. Their partially completed contributions were removed from the presented data. Eleven participants completed the world-building process and reported on their experiences of the COVID-19 lockdown. The IPA approach maintains an idiographic focus, with 10 participants at the higher end of most recommendations for sample sizes (Smith et al., 1999).

This cohort consisted of six males, four females, and one non-binary participant (⁠$n=11$⁠) with a mean age of 35.82 (⁠$SD=11.45$⁠). The National Framework of Qualifications (NFQ) is a system used to describe levels of educational qualifications in Ireland (Quality & Ireland, 2022). According to the NFQ, the education profile of the cohort consisted of levels 10 (PhD; $n=8$⁠), 9 (Master's Degree; n $=$ 1), and 8 (Honours Bachelor Degree; $n=2$⁠). The group's employment sectors included research (⁠$n=5$⁠), performance (⁠$n=2$⁠), and other (⁠$n=4$⁠) (student/art director/professor/manager). A user cube was created with 7-point Likert scales along the three central dimensions in which users' experiences differed: the ability to use contemporary digital technology, familiarity with social VR platforms (for example, AltspaceVR, BigScreen, VRChat, or Rec Room), and expertise in digital media creation (for example, making videos, capturing audio, or 3D reconstructions). Participants could then be grouped as novices, end-users, and advanced users (Nielsen, 1994).

In this study, a significant emphasis was placed on the participatory aspect of VE creation, where participants actively engaged in co-creating virtual places that held personal significance during the pandemic. This co-creation process involved participants selecting a location that resonated with their COVID-19 experience, capturing the essence of this space through digital means, and then collaboratively working with researchers to reconstruct these environments in a virtual setting (Dawkins & Young, 2020a).

The reconstructed spatial capture was then uploaded to the social VR media platform AltspaceVR to retell stories about their relationship with the chosen location during the lockdown. Once these virtual spaces were made available, they served as dynamic settings for conducting the interviews, providing a context-rich backdrop intimately familiar to the participants. This approach allowed participants to be immersed in a setting directly tied to their experiences of the pandemic, potentially facilitating deeper reflection and more nuanced responses. Using these co-created VEs for interviews represents our novel approach, where the VE setting becomes an integral part of the qualitative data collection process, offering rich, contextualized insights into the participants' experiences.

The collective narratives were the foundation for place-based storytelling, as our sense of place is the basis of many profound stories (Lambert, 2013). These insights into space and place (Tuan, 1977) were used to understand the significance of values and connection to communities and their impact. This further underscores the study's commitment to capturing the lived experiences of individuals during the pandemic in a manner that honors their personal narratives and provides a deeper, more immersive understanding of their stories. Incorporating co-created VEs aims to enrich the interview process and align with the broader goals of exploring the potential of digital storytelling and social VR as emergent tools for qualitative research.

The processes outlined below were explored to create 3D environments for digital storytelling and achieve our collective virtual field trip goals. This process involved five unique steps (Figure 2) (Dawkins & Young, 2020b). These steps utilized open-source and free-to-use software to minimize cost and maximize accessibility. No coding abilities were required to follow this process, but basic digital skills were necessary. Visual PDF guides with accompanying video tutorials were provided to assist our community of storytellers.

• Ground Truthing: visit a specific place that represents the impact of and personal response to the COVID-19 lockdown individually, explore this place first-hand, and capture it by taking images and recording ambient sound.

• Photogrammetry: use free and open-source software to analyze the digital images automatically and reconstruct a spatially accurate and textured 3D model.

• Model Cleaning and Preparation: use 3D editing software to reduce unnecessary detail and complexity in the model.

• Assembling the Virtual Environment: build the 3D scene, arrange the 3D model(s), and add 3D spatial sound to a game engine.

• The Virtual Field Trip: upload the scene to AltspaceVR, invite other community members to join in on a virtual field trip, share personal experiences of lockdown, and remodify the environment accordingly.

Following the 3D reconstruction process, participants were encouraged to discuss their experiences of COVID-19 and respond to questions concerning the phenomenon and their chosen 3D locations. In phenomenology, the researcher transcends past knowledge and experience to understand a phenomenon at a deeper level (Merleau-Ponty & Bannan, 1956). Therefore, we attempt to approach the analysis of the lived experiences of our participants with rigor (Morse et al., 2002). Researchers undertook a process known as bracketing to set aside beliefs, feelings, and perceptions to remain neutral concerning belief or disbelief, providing an open analysis of the phenomenon (Speziale et al., 2011). With a background in 3D reconstruction and having lived through the pandemic, the interviewer acknowledged and attempted to bracket those experiences. Predefined interview questions were delivered to maintain structure and remove the interviewer from the conversation to assist this process.

The first researcher conducted all 11 interviews. The interviews were recorded and then transcribed. Transcripts were prepared as clean, verbatim documents to be verified and approved by participants before analysis. The interviews lasted, on average, 13 minutes (⁠$SD=6min$⁠) and followed a semi-structured interview protocol.

In our study, the semi-structured interviews were foundational for constructing digital stories within the VR environment. While the interviews captured the participants' responses in a semi-structured format, these responses underwent a uniquely creative transformation process, evolving into immersive, narrative experiences. Moreover, we seek to highlight the novel capability of VR to turn structured interview responses into dynamic, immersive stories, offering a novel approach to understanding and sharing personal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants were asked the following questions to understand what they experienced in terms of the global pandemic phenomenon and what contexts or situations typically influenced or affected their experiences:

• What have been the general effects of the pandemic on your day-to-day life?

• How would you describe this virtual place concerning the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown?

• Did you share this place with anyone else?

• What general experiences do you relate to this place during the lockdown?

• Was there a defining experience at this place?

• What lessons about yourself do you draw from your relationship with this place?

• How often have you returned to this place; how has it changed your lockdown experiences?

• Are there any final remarks you'd like to make?

This section presents the key findings from the analysis of individual interviews, with illustrative examples for further context.

Data relating to the cohorts' ability to use digital technology (⁠$M=6.27$⁠; $SD=1.01$⁠), their familiarity or knowledge of social VR platforms (⁠$M=4.27$⁠; $SD=1.49$⁠), and their expertise or experience in digital media creation (⁠$M=5.36$⁠; $SD=1.21$⁠) were used to identify user-types; end-users (⁠$n=6$⁠), and advanced users (⁠$n=5$⁠) (see Figure 4) (Nielsen, 1994). Therefore, participants could be considered competent digital technology users familiar with social VR platforms and slightly above-average expertise in digital content creation. Furthermore, the education and employment characteristics indicated that the cohort was formed from industry professionals within academic and creative industry disciplines.

In a qualitative study of this type, controlling for gender bias was challenging, but several strategies were employed to mitigate its impact. These included conducting a stratified analysis to explore gender-related differences, triangulating data sources, reflecting on and addressing personal biases through reflexivity, seeking peer debriefing to gain external perspective, utilizing qualitative data analysis software for objective analysis, implementing member checking to involve participants in validation, and ensuring transparency in reporting the sample's gender composition and the potential gender-related bias introduced during data collection and analysis. While complete elimination of bias was difficult post-task, these approaches were applied to enhance the credibility of the presented research.

Cognitive representations of place during the COVID-19 pandemic took various forms; however, some commonalities could be observed. The commonality among these locations is that they are all landmarks, public spaces, or architectural features with unique and distinctive names or characteristics, often holding cultural, historical, or artistic significance in their respective locations. A simple description of each 3D environment can be seen in Table 1.

Based on the transcribed interview data, a multimodal thematic analysis was conducted (Sommer, 2021). The transcripts were collated and analyzed using MaxQDA (a software program for computer-assisted qualitative and mixed methods data and text analysis), identifying core themes and relationships between participant feedback. Multimodal thematic analysis with 3D data and text involves the integration of both modalities to gain a comprehensive understanding of the research topic. It allowed for a more nuanced and holistic exploration of the phenomena represented through 3D and interview reports (Boden & Eatough, 2014). Whereas a narrative study would report the experiences of a cohort, a phenomenological analysis was used to describe the ordinary meaning or essence of the COVID-19 phenomenon in the lived experiences of our participants (Creswell & Poth, 2016). Although other approaches to phenomenology exist, such as empirical and transcendental, psychological phenomenology is applied here (Moustakas, 1994). This approach was used for its distinct systematic methodology in the data analysis stage and guidelines for assembling the textual and structural descriptions.

The transcripts were read several times to obtain an overall feel for the content, and meanings were formulated from specific statements and expressions. A hierarchical thematic representation of this content was created by counting the number of single statements in each sub-theme (see Table 2). Two researchers completed this analysis with an inter-coder agreement of Kappa (⁠$k=0.8$⁠). For each participant's transcript, significant phrases or sentences about directly lived experiences of the pandemic were identified. These meanings were then clustered into themes, creating new themes from commonalities between the participants. The results could then be integrated into an in-depth description of the phenomenon. Table 2 includes significant statements with the formulated meanings grouped into themes.

During the pandemic, the cohort described various personal lived experiences. This line of discourse explored several topics relating to sharing the world with other people, personal leisure time, moments of creativity, personal development, a desire to travel or wanderlust, the minimization of their traumas, and the sense of a lived state of liminality.

While shared experiences in traditionally public places were notably reduced, there was an acknowledgment that others were also being locked down within the community and needed to use lesser-used open-air public spaces more often. Areas that were once heavily populated fell silent, and vice versa. Thus, random strangers were observed more frequently in what was described as unexpected places. During the lockdown, one participant described watching the SpaceX launch by himself while also sharing the local river promenade with many other people doing the same. Others described spending more time with family outdoors and meeting with friends in public parks.

Leisure experiences were described as being impacted adversely by the depletion of typical leisure activities due to the pandemic. However, the cohort also reported enjoying “new” opportunities to experience “quality” leisure during their free time. It was reported that after prolonged isolation during the lockdown, there was a point of “cathartic release,” a sense that the pandemic could “not get any worse,” and “life would go on.”

New creative experiences were highlighted as being a direct result of the pandemic. As one participant described:

Time alone was inspirational for some, as time became relative. Participants were no longer occupied, commuting, or working pre-pandemic hours. Hence, creativity became an escape from the reality of the situation, and “thoughts” became “more nebulous.” These “thoughts, ideas, and images” changed attitudes toward creative experiences. This shift pushed the group to explore the potential of using media as a new way of “representing that reality” and creative expression.

The pandemic “opened up avenues” of personal development that participants had not previously considered. By exploring new possibilities and being forced to experience the world differently, the cohort learned more about themselves and gained new capabilities and potential via self-reflection. As one participant describes:

Losing or gaining someone in their life allowed participants to “mature as an individual” and make “discoveries,” “realizations,” or “epiphanies” about their character and “how it [the pandemic] has also changed day-to-day life.”

Travel experiences during the pandemic were limited, and those who did “spent much time in quarantine on either side.” Therefore, wanderlust was expressed due to the lockdown: “I want to go more places, see the world, go to the places I've always wanted,” and “the biggest challenge was probably being confined to the apartment and not going away.” The desire to travel in the future was described as an optimistic outcome of the pandemic; making plans for the future brought comfort.

Participants talked of the pandemic as a more negative force for other people, describing a sympathetic and self-awareness of the plight of others. The cohort considered themselves “luckier” or more “fortunate” than others. Remarkably, they often described in graphic detail the many negative, harmful, and damaging ways they experienced the pandemic.

Finally, the liminality of the pandemic experience, the threshold between pre-COVID and post-COVID worlds, was discussed. The cohort felt that waiting was a notable theme of the pandemic. As time in “waiting rooms, the doctor's office, or an airport” was in a state of flux, the “kinds of places that people pass through and spend a little bit of time in,” the locked-down world felt “like a holding place for somewhere that I wanted to go.”

The cohort's second main thematic area reflected their experiences with health issues during the pandemic. The topics of self-care, mental well-being, protecting one's health, and physical health were discussed.

During the early days of the lockdown, it was voiced that there were heightened “anxieties around health issues,” and our participants were “protective” of their health. They were mainly “mindful of being outside” of the home and restricted their movements. For some, this was taken to extremes that were detrimental to their overall physical and mental health:

Still, outdoor activities like walking, jogging, swimming in the sea, and being closer to nature became regular excursions for generally “taking care” of oneself during the pandemic.

The pandemic “changed everything about day-to-day life,” so taking time to “relax, be resilient, and look after oneself” was necessary. Whether going outside—“I need access to an outdoor space for my well-being”—or staying inside—“I don't need to go out every day or even every week”—the cohort identified a requirement for awareness and sympathetic understanding towards their mental well-being. This awareness extended to the spaces and places they chose to occupy during the lockdown, as one participant expressed:

Coping with the everyday stresses of life during the pandemic was an essential attribute of overall health and well-being.

Personal safety and the safety of others also weighed upon the cohort. When the people surrounding the participants became ill, “everyone was paranoid,” and the requirement to self-isolate themselves became more apparent. This separation was achieved by retreating to both indoor and outdoor spaces. Outdoor locations became more necessary. The lack of respect for social distancing, mask-wearing, and travel restrictions was a source of many safety concerns when outside of the home: “I'd start panicking if someone came up to me.” Social distancing was achievable in outdoor spaces, with 2 meters easily attained on promenades or inner-city parks. However, the comfort of the outdoors was lost during the darker months of the pandemic, “I lost my will to go out,” “I also got weary because of the lockdown,” and “For most of 2021, I have not been coming here anymore.”

The cohort's health was acknowledged as being both physically and mentally challenging: “This [pandemic] took a toll on my mental health,” “I had some anxiety issues,” and “It was kind of taking a heavy toll on my mental health, and I was not doing a lot of exercises because I was not leaving the apartment.” The places they chose to occupy helped relieve some of this “suffering,” described as: “It's just isolation, mental lockdowns, and social lockdown.” Furthermore, it was observed that being isolated and restricted to small inner-city apartments served to make “people unhappy or even depressed,” and mitigating “negative thinking” required physical effort.

The third central theme discussed with the cohort was the passing of significant life events during the pandemic. These life events included references to time spent with family, death, relationships with friends, birth, and living spaces.

When the virus reached Ireland, the population was made to stay apart and cocoon those most at risk. In terms of life events, many participants said they had missed face-to-face time with extended family, socializing with children, parents, grandparents, etc., within their own family, and being with their immediate family (wives, husbands, and children) less or more often. It was noted that many family members lived outside of the 2- and 5-km travel limitation periods of the lockdown, and participants from outside Ireland did not see their families for over two years. This restriction meant young children could not see their extended families and celebrate births or birthdays together.

There were six waves of infection in Ireland, with varying effects. As of March 2022, 6753 people have died from Covid 19. In addition to the many trials of lockdown, there were immeasurable and “traumatic” losses to many families during this time. Due to travel restrictions, families were unable to share their loss:

New relationships with neighbors and nearby friends blossomed while their family members were unreachable. While participants “missed having the occasional pint with friends” and “consequently not meeting people,” they could still share their experiences with friends and family remotely. Sharing their “successes, failures'' and experiencing ``great memories together” made them feel more comfortable when physically alone during the varying lockdowns. The cohort expressed that they had reached out and shared with friends worldwide to “electronically invite” them into their isolated worlds.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on pregnancy, birthing, and postpartum experiences will require further, more focused attention in the coming years. Our limited female cohort touched upon perceived loneliness and trauma within this life event, predominantly managing work obligations and childcare:

Finally, the spaces people lived in were a factor in the life-experiences theme touched upon by our cohort. During the pandemic, moving house or having family members move away impacted the participants; for example, “When I moved into the house I'm living in, my family moved country simultaneously.” Moving during the pandemic was distressing; this included moving into less than ideal circumstances: “like many people who live near the city center, I don't have a garden, and my apartment is tiny.” However, local inner-city open-space amenities were explored and used as an “escape” from “cooped-up apartments.”

The environments that our participants reconstructed were used as representations of the lockdown and served as the setting of our interviews. Additionally, when discussing different environments they experienced during the pandemic, the cohort raised further attention to the importance of natural and built environments and sharing these spaces with pets and animals.

Most environments that our participants reconstructed were natural, including trees, gardens, and seaside promenades. These spaces provided respite from the pandemic and were described as “magical,” “calm and relaxing,” and “peaceful and quiet.” The passing of the seasons was observed to keep track of the more extensive lockdown period. Many outdoor places of interest were explored for the first time: “I would say because of Covid, I'm here [outside] a lot more” and “The lockdown was the reason I walked this path the first time.”

The discovery of new routes through the built environment was also discussed. Urban river-side areas, canopied streets, and unusual street-side features were discussed. Manufactured and iconic landscape topographies, such as private and public gardens, cemeteries, and defensive towers, were featured. These spaces changed the “experience of the lockdown . . . to see its potential, even the prospect of a place even when it is locked down or even when it is not even physically present.” Indoor spaces, such as classroom/lecture halls, were “replaced by Zoom, by Teams, and all the other video conferencing tools we have,” and “distinct” artificial features became objects of “imagination,” “intrigue,” and “interest.” Furthermore, the perception of these places during lockdown altered their meaning:

Finally, it is worth mentioning that these environments were not always shared with humans. During lockdown, many people spent more time with their pets, taking them for walks and generally being with them at home more often. Moreover, when working remotely and paying attention to mindfulness practices in nature, the sounds of wildlife were focussed upon “a cuckoo and a pheasant, a pigeon and the little birds singing away, and so there's a lot of nature around us, and I think there's a branch snap at one point as well which is probably deer.” “Dog spotting,” “listening to the bird song,” and “spending time in nature” described our cohort's relationship when sharing spaces with non-humans.

The technology theme covered the use of IT for unified communication, the ASVR world-building process, and the use of technology for sharing experiences. There was a consensus on the suitability of social VR for sharing virtual places and using these technologies to facilitate remote telepresence during the pandemic.

Group members reported pre-pandemic familiarity with some ICTs; these technologies included software such as Teamspeak and Skype. However, the use of embodiment augmented the information contained during communications, for example:

When experiencing VR for the first time, the participants talked about “challenging” scenarios during lockdown where “embodiment” and the “substantial scalability” of ASVR were avenues for exploration.

Concerning the 3D reconstruction process, the accurate capture of these significant places caused frustration when the final 3D model contained anomalies: “I had maybe three or four goes, which frustrated me, but it's not because the technology was the problem.” The locations selected for the individual projects had objects of significance for the cohort; therefore, visual fidelity was a factor in their evaluation. However, the multimodality of the reconstruction was considered favorably: “It's not about sharing a model, but an actual place, and the audio, I believe, helps illustrate that space a bit better.”

Participants also talked about their different uses of social media during the pandemic and sharing their 3D renders with others: “sharing it online was incredible, it got an excellent reaction,” and “people seemed to have enjoyed it.” Sharing extended their CGI worlds to include “friends and family,” as expressed:

With the lockdown enforcing strict travel restrictions, the day-to-day work paradigm was disrupted, and commuting to the workplace became impossible. As such, the topic of employment was discussed, incorporating issues of work-from-home and commuting.

Working from home was an option pre-pandemic for some: “I enjoy working from home. So I don't see it as too inconvenient.” However, this did not mean that working from home full-time was easy. The transition was detrimental for some participants as face-to-face meetings were considered necessary. Moreover, working from home impacted productivity and work-life balances negatively, for example:

These issues focused on “structure,” accessing workplace facilities, and “isolation” or “living in a Zoom tunnel for all that time and not interacting with real people.”

Although participants expressed that working from home was problematic, they also felt that it was most advantageous due to the time it takes to commute to a central place of work: “I like working from home. I don't miss the commute.” “No longer commuting into the office” meant that the participants could spend more time in their chosen locations, places that they wanted to be; for example:

During the study, participants shared their personal experiences, revealing the impact of the pandemic on shared public spaces, leisure activities, and creativity. While traditional activities were adversely affected, new opportunities for quality leisure and creative expression emerged during isolation. The pandemic prompted personal growth, self-reflection, and discoveries as people navigated loss and change. Despite limitations on travel, a strong desire to explore the world persisted, offering comfort in planning for the future. Participants displayed empathy for others' struggles while recognizing their relative fortune. The pandemic experience was described as a liminal state, with waiting and uncertainty shaping their perceptions of a pre- and post-pandemic world.

Our participants relayed their experiences with health issues during the pandemic, highlighting the heightened anxieties around health and protective behaviors that emerged during the early days of the lockdown. The participants engaged in outdoor activities like walking, jogging, and being closer to nature to care for themselves. The pandemic brought about significant changes in day-to-day life, and the need for relaxation, resilience, and self-care became crucial. They also mentioned how personal safety and the safety of others were significant concerns, leading to self-isolation and retreating to indoor and outdoor spaces. The pandemic's toll on physical and mental health was addressed, with participants experiencing anxiety, depression, and the need to mitigate negative thinking through physical exercise. The pandemic influenced individual health and well-being, emphasizing the importance of mental and physical health during challenging times.

The participants discussed the passing of significant life events during the pandemic and how they were affected by the various restrictions and lockdowns. The pandemic led to missed face-to-face time with extended family and friends, conditions on attending funerals and mourning losses, and difficulties maintaining relationships with loved ones outside travel limitation areas. Births and postpartum experiences were also impacted, with some participants experiencing perceived loneliness and trauma during pregnancy and childbirth. The pandemic also affected living spaces, with participants experiencing distress due to moving during the pandemic or living in less-than-ideal circumstances. The use of local inner-city open-space amenities was seen as an escape from the confined apartment living during lockdowns. The pandemic fundamentally shaped the cohort's life events, relationships, and living situations.

Our study explores the environments and physical spaces experienced by the participants during the lockdown. Natural environments, such as trees, gardens, and seaside promenades, provided respite from the pandemic and were described as peaceful and magical. The lockdown prompted our cohort to explore outdoor places of interest and discover new routes through the built environment, such as urban river-side areas and canopied streets. Indoor spaces were replaced by virtual platforms for remote work and education, altering the perception and meaning of these places. Additionally, the pandemic led to increased interactions with pets and a focus on wildlife and nature during mindfulness practices. The significance of these environments in shaping people's experiences and perceptions during the COVID-19 pandemic and their relationships with nature and animals was revealed.

Participants reported using various ICTs for unified communication, such as Zoom and Teams, to facilitate remote telepresence and stay connected during the pandemic. The emergence of social VR platforms allowed them to share virtual places and experiences, providing a sense of embodiment and interaction in a challenging scenario where physical interactions were limited. Participants engaged in the ASVR world-building process to recreate significant places and share their 3D renders with others through social media. This technology allowed them to extend their social interactions beyond physical limitations, enabling friends and family to experience and appreciate their creations virtually. This area of focus showcases how technology, particularly VR and online communication platforms, played a crucial role in maintaining social connections and sharing experiences during the pandemic.

With commuting to the workplace becoming impossible, many individuals transitioned to working from home, an option for some even before the pandemic. While some participants found it convenient and enjoyed the flexibility of working from home, others faced challenges. The lack of face-to-face meetings was deemed necessary for specific tasks, and the transition negatively affected productivity and work-life balance. Working from home brought structural issues, access to workplace facilities, and feelings of isolation from fundamental human interactions. However, participants also acknowledged the advantage of saving time on commuting and being able to spend more time in locations they preferred. The significant shift in work dynamics brought about by the pandemic was raised, with working from home becoming a more prominent feature in people's lives due to the restrictions and safety measures in place.

The results comprehensively explore various aspects of individuals' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic that have been reported in other studies. It aligns with existing findings about the pandemic's impact on shared public spaces (Bustamante et al., 2022), leisure activities (Takiguchi et al., 2023), access to creativity (Khlystova et al., 2022), personal growth (Khan et al., 2022), self-reflection (Dolan et al., 2020), and a desire to explore the world (Wang & Xia, 2021). It also addresses the heightened anxieties around health and protective behaviors (Haig-Ferguson et al., 2021), the influence on individual health and well-being (Faulkner et al., 2021), the passing of significant life events (Shanahan et al., 2022), the significance of environments and spaces during lockdowns (Marques et al., 2022), and the role of technology in facilitating remote interactions and work-from-home arrangements (Hayes et al., 2021). Predictably, an increase in mental health disorders became evident amid the COVID-19 outbreak (OECD, 2022; WHO, 2022). Nonetheless, post-pandemic, the quantity of individuals dealing with mental health issues remains elevated and surpasses the levels observed before the pandemic (OECD, 2022). Overall, our results offer valuable insights into how the pandemic affected people's lives in the ROI.

The socioeconomic condition of marginalization via isolation has, perhaps, never come under as much pressure as it has been due to the global pandemic in the ROI. The imposition of social distancing by-laws in almost every nation-state means that individuals were obliged to work and play for most of 2020 and 2021 without any concrete idea of when fully embodied social contact would be re-permitted. As a result, people turned to digitally networked platforms to collaborate and discover more qualitative means of disembodied socializing and new creative expression forms (Ryu & Cho, 2022).

Within this space, VR technologies hold excellent potential because not only do they harness the audiovisual capabilities of existing video-conferencing technologies, but by tracking hand gestures and affording the sensation of six degrees of freedom (6DoF), they provide the potential for gestural expression, thus facilitating a more natural sense of a social gathering and ultimately strengthening collective intersubjectivity and community (Bailenson, 2018). This suggests that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital platforms for social interactions and creative expression, prompting the exploration of VR technologies to address the challenges of isolation and enhance connectedness.

While there is evidence of a global alteration in expressed sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, the emotional impacts of the epidemic and related policy interventions remain scarce (Wang et al., 2022). In general, outdoor activities are positively associated with mental, physical, and social health outcomes. As such, the most popular places chosen for the 3D cognitive representation of place were outdoors, which demands some physical activity for access. Following this, 3D environments of areas that represent creativity were also presented. Leventhal et al. define how individuals can be active problem-solvers whose behavior can result from their cognitive and emotional responses to a health threat (Leventhal et al., 2001). Therefore, cognitive representations can be used to determine behavior; how persons living during the global pandemic imagine and reconstruct their experiences may be vital in understanding the impact of the phenomena.

During interviews, the initial response was to downplay and minimize pandemic experiences and be thankful. Still, the consequences of the lockdown forced many people and their immediate families into difficult life situations. As such, Luttik et al. (2020) emphasize the interconnectedness of families' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and underscore the crucial role of family nursing in providing support and care during and after the crisis. Many negative impacts were observed, as presented. Still, hope was manifested in a desire to travel, creativity, and new understandings of nature and the built environment. The community, the amateur, and the economy of contribution played a vital role in this storytelling activity. While some participants focussed on describing life and death, others spoke of the emotional and social consequences of the pandemic. Many of the chosen cognitive representations took the form of outdoor spaces. Participants used these environments to show how they had coped with life during the lockdown, successfully creating virtual places (Morse et al., 2002). This observation emphasizes the complexity of pandemic experiences, the importance of hope and resilience, community and collective storytelling, and the significance of virtual representations as coping mechanisms during challenging times.

Throughout the twentieth century, the industrial, cultural production, and consumption paradigm under the aegis of mechanical mass reproducibility championed a hegemonic (top-down) model (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002). Due to its unidirectional mode of communication, the culture industry coerced the amateurish spectator into the position of passive and impotent consumption, which has had the adverse effect of stifling the creative impetus that art amateurs used to possess and exercise in previous generations. To understand this mutation of the amateur and its social role, the etymological origin of the term reveals its relationship with the notion of love: “(‘amat,’ from the Latin verb ‘amare,’ ‘to love'): that's what makes an amateur an amateur” (Stiegler, 2010). But this is an appreciative notion of love tied to aesthetics, objectivity, art, and, ultimately, nature (Desmond et al., 2015). Primarily, the art amateur is someone who loves art. Through a mutual play between the observer and the art object, the amateur is transformed by the work of art (Stiegler, 2017). Our findings highlight the historical shift in cultural production and consumption of 3D art, the impact on the role of amateurs, the relationship between love and aesthetics in amateurism, and the transformative power of art for amateurs. This outcome encourages a deeper examination of how the cultural industry has shaped and altered the traditional role of amateurs and their relationship with art and creative expression during the various lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

The top-down content creation and dissemination model, hegemonically controlled by media corporations and government institutions, cauterizes the amateur's creative modus operandi, making psychosocial pathologies more apparent. For Stiegler, the new “mechinic turn of sensibility” (Stiegler, 2017) manifest in the emergence of interactive digital technologies, occasions the potential “rebirth of the figure of the amateur” (Desmond et al., 2015), and a re-inclusion of non-professionals in the production of cultural symbols. This approach highlights the need to nurture an economy of contribution in which the amateur is positioned as a key “economic actor” (Stiegler, 2017) who maintains “the possibility of critiquing the network structure, of intervening in it, of contributing to the organization of the processing algorithms and the operating metadata they generate.” Edifying individual and collective relational dynamics of what constitutes “community” in terms of these new potentialities, networked social VR may help to furnish new forms of individual and collective expression that (in a short time) could help with the reconciliation of sociopolitically imposed traumas of the pandemic and (in the long-term) present new ways of generating cultural knowledge, in the form of performativity and place-based creative expression.

To address our PRQ, we can see how digital storytelling in VR environments during the COVID-19 pandemic profoundly influenced the articulation and perception of personal experiences by offering an immersive platform that enhances emotional resonance and contextual understanding. Through VR, individuals can recreate and relive their pandemic experiences in a context-rich setting, fostering more profound empathy among audiences and providing storytellers with a unique sense of agency in conveying their narratives. This immersive storytelling can bridge understanding gaps, making diverse experiences more accessible and engaging. Moreover, the interactivity inherent in VR storytelling encourages audience engagement, making the narratives more impactful. By allowing storytellers to process and reflect on their experiences in a virtual space, VR also serves as a tool for introspection, aiding in the deeper and more nuanced articulation of their COVID-19 stories, thereby enriching the collective understanding of the pandemic's multifaceted impact.

Our phenomenological approach to analysis has provided rich descriptive data concerning our cohort's mental representations of place during the pandemic, highlighting the importance of H1. Consequently, the study explored these representations within collective storytelling. Thus, the cohort successfully described and recreated places they experienced during the pandemic to draw personal narratives in embodied remote storytelling, giving credit to H2. Overall, this points to the need for more comprehensive research on the emotional impacts of the pandemic, the significance of outdoor activities for well-being, the role of cognitive representations in shaping behavior, and the value of phenomenological approaches and storytelling in understanding individuals’ experiences during difficult times.

The implications of this research highlight the potential of interactive digital technologies to empower amateurs, the importance of recognizing amateurs as significant contributors, the potential of networked social VR for healing and cultural knowledge generation, and the need for alternative approaches to content creation and dissemination. We advocate for a more inclusive and participatory model for analyzing the COVID-19 pandemic, fostering creativity, cultural expression, and community-building beyond traditionally highly-quantitative top-down approaches.

While our study provides an in-depth exploration of personal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, its significance extends beyond the immediate context. It offers valuable insights into the XR landscape, storytelling practices, and therapeutic approaches for addressing societal challenges in the post-pandemic era.

Our research highlights VR's potential to forge immersive, personal storytelling experiences, pushing the boundaries of what is possible within XR content. We introduce an innovative content creation method that emphasizes emotional depth and personal significance by employing photogrammetric reconstruction within VR. This approach can inspire many new XR use cases, from historical documentation and cultural preservation to customized education and training scenarios, enriching the XR domain with new possibilities and applications.

Integrating personal narratives with immersive environments opens a new chapter in storytelling, transforming the audience from passive spectators to active participants within the narrative space. This paradigm shift has the potential to revolutionize digital storytelling across various sectors, including cinema, journalism, and literature, offering more engaging, empathetic, and interactive narrative experiences.

The act of reconstructing and revisiting personal spaces in VR offers promising therapeutic benefits, suggesting new directions for psychological interventions. Such immersive re-enactments can provide individuals with a novel means to process and confront their experiences, offering potential therapeutic benefits for dealing with post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and other mental health issues in a safe and controlled virtual setting.

Distinguishing between IPA and virtual ethnography within our study underscores the unique value of immersive VR methodologies. While IPA offers profound insights into individual experiences, incorporating virtual ethnography with VR introduces an additional layer of spatial and experiential context, enriching our qualitative analysis and providing a more comprehensive understanding of participants' lived experiences.

The framework we have developed for sharing and exploring personal experiences in immersive environments sets a foundation for tackling future societal challenges. Whether in response to global crises, environmental shifts, or social disruptions, the methodologies fostered by this study could offer more empathetic and nuanced understandings of human experiences, promoting resilience and solidarity in the face of future adversities. Therefore, our study serves as a retrospective examination of pandemic experiences and a visionary contribution to XR technology, digital storytelling, and therapeutic methodologies, underscoring its enduring relevance and utility in our evolving post-COVID world.

This research has demonstrated the value of an idiographic, phenomenological, grounded theory approach to gathering data on lived experiences of the global pandemic. Still, some limitations should be highlighted. First, rather than being a specifically powerful tool, it has been suggested that IPA may have been primarily employed in health psychology due to many of its initial supporters having careers in this field (Brocki & Wearden, 2006). Moreover, while IPA appears to be applicable and valuable in a wide variety of research topics, there is a general lack of attention afforded to the interpretative facet of the approach (Brocki & Wearden, 2006).

The study aimed to capture the experience of life during the COVID-19 pandemic by looking in detail at individual accounts and employing their descriptions of the events that unfolded via the general exploration of H1, H2, and our PRQ. A more advanced IPA study design could offer multiple perspectives on the shared experience of the lockdown (e.g., husbands and wives, parents and children, employers and employees, etc.). Collecting accounts over time may also be valuable in developing a reflective longitudinal analysis of our findings and questioning these primary themes' long-term impact on the cohort.

In this study, we have explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the socioeconomic condition of marginalization via isolation, particularly within ROI. It is crucial, however, to acknowledge that while the pandemic has exerted unprecedented pressure on societies globally, other forms of marginalization and isolation persist and, in some instances, are exacerbated by factors such as war, conflict, and natural disasters. In such contexts, the reliance on digitally networked platforms for social connection, as observed in our study, is not universally applicable or accessible. This disparity underscores the multifaceted nature of marginalization and isolation, which can intensify various crises beyond the pandemic. As we reflect on the findings from the ROI, it is imperative to consider these global disparities and recognize the varied experiences of individuals and communities worldwide, some of whom face immediate danger and have limited access to digital resources or safe environments for academic and social engagement.

Another emergent limitation of the study is the long-term preservation of the cognitive representation of the pandemic. Unfortunately, the sunsetting of AltspaceVR in 2023 has meant that many of these virtual worlds will be lost forever, as access and maintenance of the virtual worlds rests with the participant or group who created them. Further studies should consider maintaining responsibility for these 3D creations from a central repository for preserving data for future reference.

In our work, we describe an emergent form of digital storytelling incorporating multimodal 3D spatial media and social VR for recording community narratives developed for use in a shared immersive VE. Our approach to immersive community-based digital storytelling successfully created a series of personally meaningful places in social VR as a cognitive representation of the pandemic. As per RQ1, our participants utilized digital storytelling within VR to articulate and process their pandemic experiences through immersive, interactive, and reflective practices that transform their personal narratives into shared, spatial, and dynamic experiences. The struggles and labors of the year in lockdown could be shared and discussed with remote participation. These shared experiences emphasized the importance of embodying physical spaces and the significance of sharing stories in virtual placemaking activities.

Photogrammetrically reconstructed VEs influenced storytelling and narrative engagement in various ways, enhancing the depth, immersion, and emotional resonance of the narrative experience for participants and providing valuable data for RQ2. During the storytelling process, our participants communicated contemporary life elements that have been both challenging and uplifting. Statements relating to experiences, health, life events, environment, technology, and employment were all anchored in the cognitive representations of the recreated places. Personal narratives within VR provided a unique and immersive way to understand the psychological and social impacts of the pandemic, offering insights that might be less accessible through traditional narrative or data collection (RQ3). Thus, for our PRQ, we successfully identified personal lived experiences or consequences of being in lockdown. We offer a unique perspective on the emotional impact of the pandemic and the role of individual mechanisms that helped our cohort through difficult times, as well as the avoidance, acceptance, and control methods that reveal what was experienced on the ground and in the wild. We anticipate our research as a starting point for future technology-mediated co-creative arts practice using social VR.

In summary, digital storytelling within photogrammetrically reconstructed VR environments offers a multidimensional platform for individuals to articulate their pandemic experiences, providing deeper insights into their cognitive and emotional journeys (H1). This method enriches the narrative experience, offering valuable perspectives on the personal impacts of global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. VR's capacity to deliver immersive, interactive personal narratives provides a powerful tool for exploring and understanding the pandemic's complex psychological and social consequences (H2). This engagement enriches individual empathy and emotional connection and contributes to a broader, more comprehensive understanding of the pandemic's global impact.

This publication reflects research conducted with the financial support of the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant Number 15/RP/2776 and the Horizon Europe Framework Program (HORIZON) under grant agreement 101070109.