VR History is a University of Tartu spin-off specialising in custom XR solutions for museums, visitor attractions, tourism destinations and edutainment. Alongside client projects, the company also operates its own public experience, VR Tallinn 1939/44, giving the team direct contact with end users and continuous insight into how visitor expectations are evolving.
VR Tallinn 1939/44 is an outdoor immersive journey through time, developed in Unreal Engine for PICO 4 Enterprise headsets. The experience allows visitors to stand in today’s city and compare the same locations across 1939, 1944 and 1946, revealing how profoundly the Second World War changed Tallinn’s Old Town.
Historical authenticity is central to the project. As the company’s co-founders are historians, the experience is based on extensive research and careful reconstruction. The journey to 1939 restores Harju Street in exceptional detail, from architecture and shopfronts to signage and atmosphere. Visitors encounter the street in the early morning and again in the evening twilight, when business signs and neon advertisements begin to glow, before ending the scene in the elegant Golden Lion suite.
The journey to 1944 begins on the evening of 9 March at 6 p.m., during the third year of Nazi German occupation in Estonia. Visitors witness the devastation caused by the March bombing and stand among the ruins of Harju Street. The final scene moves to 1946, placing visitors in the early period of Soviet occupation.
The experience is available in nine languages, and VR History also offers educational programmes for schools based on the same content. The oldest visitor to date has been 93, reflecting the project’s broad accessibility. To accommodate a wide age range and ensure a comfortable group experience, the interactions were designed around hand tracking.
In Estonia, VR History operates three outdoor VR attractions, and its largest educational programme to date has hosted just over 400 students in a single day.
