When a theater is demolished, the performances, the acoustics, and the shared experience of attending disappear with the building. Virtual Reality can bring these elements back inside a reconstructed space, provided the reconstruction goes beyond static visualization. This work presents an integrated framework to enable shared, interactive and immersive visits to lost theatrical heritage, combining visual and acoustic reconstruction, a catalog of theatrical performances with subtitles, Points of Interest with multilingual audio narration, and real-time volumetric capture of remote visitors rendered as holographic presences inside the virtual space. The approach is demonstrated through Casa de Comedias de l’Olivera, a Valencian theater first built in 1584, rebuilt in 1618, and demolished in the mid eighteenth century.

Directing a live presentation involves continuous decision-making: selecting which camera feed or scene to display, synchronizing visual content with the speaker’s narrative, and responding to the presenter’s actions in real time. In many settings where presentations occur (classrooms, seminars, webinars, videoconferences), this process is either absent or handled manually by the presenter or a dedicated operator. This paper explores whether multimodal AI techniques, executed locally on consumer hardware, can support the automation of this process. It presents a proof of concept for a system referred to as an AI director: a modular pipeline built with open-source components that processes a live video feed alongside audio transcription and gesture recognition to describe the presenter’s actions and extract information from the presentation content. All processing runs on-device, with no cloud dependency. The system is part of a broader work in progress toward multi-camera automated direction; the paper reports on the devised architecture, the selected components, and preliminary observations on feasibility and resource constraints.

This paper presents a research framework for investigating Quality of Experience (QoE) aspects when interactively exploring reconstructions of cultural heritage in Virtual Reality (VR) settings. In particular, it revolves around a reconstruction of the Corral de Comèdies de l’Olivera, a 16th-century theater from Valencia demolished in 1748. The presented framework enables an interactive exploration of the reconstructed virtual environment through various navigation methods and User Interface (UI) presentation approaches, specifically designed for VR. Likewise, the reconstruction includes diverse Points of Interest (PoIs) containing historical information, theatrical performances including diverse video formats, and a personalized presentation of accessibility features. Overall, the paper aims to showcase how immersive technologies can preserve and disseminate cultural heritage that no longer exists physically. The modular implementation of the considered interaction features and methods additionally constitute a powerful framework to explore and validate QoE design patterns for optimal virtual heritage experiences.