A national anniversary, experienced from inside the crowd
To mark the 80th anniversary of the August Revolution and National Day, the Voice of Vietnam (VOV) — the state broadcaster that aired the original 1945 announcement — put the public inside a virtual reconstruction of Ba Dinh Square on 2 September 1945, the moment President Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence founding the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The experience, Trở về thời khắc thiêng liêng ("Return to the Sacred Moment"), was produced by VOV with its VTC News outlet and built by the Institute of Information and Communications Technology (CDIT) at the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology (PTIT).
The experience
Visitors put on Meta Quest headsets and are placed in the square among the crowd. They can look and move freely through the 360-degree scene, hear the ambient sound of the gathering and the collective oath "Xin thề", and take part with a hand gesture. Professor Vu Minh Giang, the project's historical advisor, narrates. Sessions ran in groups of about 20 people and lasted roughly five minutes.
How it was built
CDIT reconstructed the square and its occupants in real-time 3D over a development period of about two months, working with an advisory board spanning history, culture, information technology, sculpture and music. Period photographs were used alongside 3D scans of recognised sculptural works held by the National Museum of History to model Ho Chi Minh's figure. Environmental detail — moving flags, swaying trees, the autumn light, banners — was reconstructed along with a 360-degree soundscape, and the crowd was populated with a reported 20,000-plus virtual attendees. The team optimised the build so that large numbers of headsets could run the scene simultaneously at a public venue.
Where it ran
The experience opened at VOV's National Broadcasting Centre at 58 Quan Su, Hanoi, from 19 to 21 August 2025, where more than 10,000 people registered within 30 minutes of the online booking portal opening. It then moved to VOV's roughly 500 m² stand at the national exhibition "80 Years of Independence – Freedom – Happiness" (A80) at the Vietnam Exposition Center in Dong Anh, Hanoi, from 28 August. That run was extended with the exhibition, closing on 15 September 2025. Admission was free.
Reception
Across the Hanoi run the VR drew more than 30,000 experiences, out of some 50,000 visitors to VOV's exhibition area overall, at a daily throughput of roughly 1,300 to 1,600 people. The 10,000th visitor at the A80 stand was recorded on 5 September 2025. Vietnamese coverage placed it fifth among 80 experiences at the anniversary exhibition and rated it the leading digital-technology experience there. Senior officials including Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son, Minister of Science and Technology Nguyen Manh Hung and Minister of Industry and Trade Nguyen Hong Dien tried it at the venue.
Afterwards
The programme subsequently toured beyond Hanoi, running at the Kim Lien national historical site in Nghe An province in May 2026 and at Independence Palace in Ho Chi Minh City in August 2026. Those later runs are separate deployments and are catalogued separately.
