VR experience «Trở về thời khắc thiêng liêng» (Return to the Sacred Moment)

   You put on a VR headset in a park on the bank of the Hàn river, and you are standing on Ba Đình square on the afternoon of 2 September 1945, inside the crowd listening to Hồ Chí Minh read the Declaration of Independence. A few minutes later the headset comes off and you are back in today's Đà Nẵng, flags out across the centre for the holiday.

   The programme reaches the city for the 81st anniversary of that declaration. On that day in 1945 Hồ Chí Minh announced the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a state that grew out of the August Revolution which had begun in Hà Nội two weeks earlier. The whole reconstruction is built around that single scene: the platform, the square, the crowd and the voice reading the text.

   How it works on site:

• — registration is in person only, at the gate on the Bạch Đằng side; bring an ID document or VNeID
• — you receive a sticker with your queue number
• — groups of 20 people enter the VR area at a time, each session runs about five minutes, and technicians help you fit the headset
• — on the way out there is a photo point, a visitors' book and a small gift

   The project arrives in Đà Nẵng with a track record. It launched in Hà Nội for the 80th anniversary in 2025 and logged more than 35,000 visits. It then travelled to Quảng Ninh province in September 2025, to the Kim Liên memorial complex in Nghệ An province, Hồ Chí Minh's birthplace, in May 2026, and to Dinh Độc Lập (Independence Palace) in Hồ Chí Minh City this August, where three days drew more than 8,000 visits. The figures come from VTC News, a co-organiser of the programme.

   The venue is part of the point. Công viên APEC opened in November 2017 as Vietnam's gift to the leaders' summit that Đà Nẵng hosted, and its triangular 3,047 m² plot holds 21 sculptures sent by the member economies. The park was later extended under a steel dome 15.7 m high, shaped like a rising kite, and now runs down to the Bạch Đằng riverside walk and the bridges over the Hàn.

   Behind the project is Đài Tiếng nói Việt Nam (VOV, the Voice of Vietnam) together with the Đà Nẵng party committee and people's committee, delivered by the newspaper VTC News and the municipal department of culture, sports and tourism. The virtual scene was built by the CDIT institute at the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology (PTIT).

   Come as a family: children are admitted to the headsets from the age of five, and under-nines must be accompanied by an adult. Older visitors tend to measure the reconstruction against their own memory, while for newcomers to Vietnam it is the shortest available explanation of why 2 September carries so much weight here.

   A few practical notes. There is no advance booking and no fixed session times: the programme runs the same way on all three days and you join a live queue. The organisers ask you to arrive by public transport, since parking nearby is limited, and to bring a hat and an umbrella, because the queue waits in the open. Inside the headset you hear Vietnamese, the archive recording from the autumn of 1945, but the scene is visual and reads without translation.

   Five minutes inside a headset that puts the autumn of 1945 in the middle of modern Đà Nẵng. Arrive early in the day, because at earlier stops the queue formed before opening.