Conceptualising Virtual Reality Experiences for the Difficult Heritage as Thanatechnologies

While virtual reality (VR) has increasingly been adopted in heritage practices, particularly for immersive storytelling and memory mediation, little attention has been given to its conceptual use for difficult heritage. This type of cultural heritage, marked by trauma, conflict, human suffering, and contested narratives, presents distinct challenges for digital mediation. VR experiences risk oversimplifying trauma related to difficult heritage through gamification, trivialization, or ethically ambiguous first-person perspectives. Despite growing interest in immersive technologies, such as VR, the heritage field still lacks a consistent conceptual framework to address these tensions. By contextualizing how difficult heritage has been brought into VR, the article delineates the challenges of current practices and ultimately calls for a framework more attuned to representing difficult heritage in immersive formats. Drawing on examples like “Anne Frank House VR”, “Lipke VR bunker”, and “Nobody’s Listening”, the author of this article proposes that framing such VR experiences as thanatechnologies – a term coined by Carla Sofka [1997] and drawn from thanatology or death studies – offers a more ethical conceptual lens. Thanatechnologies emphasize ethically grounded, thanasensitive or death-sensitive design that respects the affective, historical, and mnemonic weight of the past, thus creating more responsible digital forms of remembrance. Furthermore, by positioning VR not only as a tool of simulation but as a medium of mourning, the article contributes to a broader conceptual framework for immersive difficult heritage practices.