WanderLens

Inspiration Many local histories and oral stories are invisible in the physical world. We wanted to make hidden memories, folklore, and community stories visible again through imaginative and explorable experiences.

What it does WanderLens turns unseen history and spoken stories into immersive story spaces. It helps people see, enter, and explore stories that once not tangible.

How we built it We built an editor that supports a text-to-image-to-world workflow, allowing stories to be transformed into immersive spatial experiences step by step. We use a unified timeline system to organize, edit, and load the full story flow. To make the tool accessible to non-technical tour guides and creators, we designed a visual editor similar to video editing software, where customized tour experiences can be created through simple dragging, clicking, and sequencing. We use initial splats as the explorable spatial foundation, then use World Lab Marble, AI-generated world models, spatial portals, and narrative layers to reconstruct hidden histories and build immersive story spaces.

Challenges we ran into One challenge was finding the right balance between historical grounding and imaginative visual storytelling. Another was making these layered experiences feel seamless, intuitive, and emotionally engaging in real-world spaces.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We built a way to make invisible stories visible and explorable. We’re especially proud that WanderLens can turn oral history and forgotten narratives into vivid spatial experiences that people can walk through and discover.

What we learned We learned that stories become much more powerful when people can actively explore them instead of only reading or hearing them. We also learned that AI can help reconstruct and visualize histories that were never fully documented.

What's next for WanderLens Next, we want to build better tools for communities and creators to turn oral histories into immersive experiences more easily. We also want to expand WanderLens into more historical, cultural, and educational storytelling projects.