Firefly Memories by Fireflore
Written by Hang (Flora) Tran of the Fireflore team for VIVERSE.
About FireFlore
We are Fireflore —a multidisciplinary team of researchers, artists, and storytellers, working alongside local organizations and communities across Vietnam to reimagine how conservation stories can be told.
Firefly Memories first came to life in July 2025, born from a simple conviction: that emotions, not just facts, are what connect people to nature and inspire them to care for it. Over the months since, the project has grown through the generous support of many individuals and organizations, far too many to name here, and we are deeply grateful to each of them.
Our core team: Dr Hang (Flora) Tran, project manager and researcher in immersive technology and sustainability; MinHang, XR artist and creative lead, the hands behind the world you see on VIVERSE; Bui Minh Duc, storyteller and narrative writer; and Thu Ngo (Rainee) , who brought the offline events to life through material design, photography, and recap videos at each stop.
Firefly Memories is not the work of any single person. It is the result of a shared belief, held by everyone who has contributed to it, that the most powerful path to caring for nature runs straight through the heart.
The Journey
The sun slips behind a peaceful garden in the Vietnamese countryside. Banana leaves rustle in the evening breeze. Frogs call softly from a nearby pond. As the light deepens into dusk, small sparks rise from the bushes. Fireflies.
For many Vietnamese, fireflies once lit the evenings of childhood. They were ordinary, taken for granted, as common as the smell of rain on warm earth. Then, quietly, they began to disappear.
Urban expansion, artificial lighting, and shrinking habitats have pushed fireflies and countless other species toward endangerment. A generation of Vietnamese children is growing up in cities having never seen one. Fireflies are only the most luminous symbol of a much wider crisis: from rare insects to forest mammals, biodiversity across Vietnam is under mounting pressure.
Firefly Memories was created in response to this quiet loss. Not as a lament, but as an invitation. And it raises a pressing question at its core:
How can we nurture care for wildlife, without adding further harm?
Traditional conservation education often relies on direct encounters with nature. But these encounters, however well-intentioned, can cause stress to animals, damage fragile ecosystems, and risk turning wildlife into spectacle. We needed a different approach, one that could move people emotionally, without putting nature at risk. That is where immersive technology came in, and where the collaboration between Open Brush and VIVERSE made it possible to bring this world to life and share it openly with anyone, anywhere.
Building the World
“Step into a journey across three lands: a quiet rural garden, a crowded city crossroads, and a living primary forest.”
Firefly Memories was built using Open Brush and published on VIVERSE through the Open Brush x VIVERSE collaboration, a partnership that makes it possible for artists to paint directly in VR and share their worlds with a global audience without barriers. For a project about making conservation accessible, that openness felt right from the start.
The world takes you through three distinct spaces, each carrying its own emotional weight:
The Rural Garden
The City Crossroads
The Primary Forest
The through-line is simple interaction and reflection. There are no scores, no objectives. You move through the world, pause, and witness. Tucked inside, there is a short but direct message waiting for you, one we will not spoil here. The emotional journey follows a deliberate arc: nostalgia, then discomfort, then hope. But where it lands, personally, is something only you can discover.
“One small light. One forest revived.”
Since its publication on VIVERSE, the world has drawn visitors from across the platform, with comments ranging from “This is beautiful!” to “I felt like a firefly.” One viewer wrote: “I was like ‘oh what’s down this road’ then bam! Another area!” which is, perhaps, exactly the spirit of the experience.
Enter Firefly Memories & find the message.
The Technical Process
The Firefly Memories world was painted entirely within Open Brush, the open-source VR painting tool, a deliberate choice that shaped everything about the aesthetic.
Rather than constructing precise 3D geometry, Open Brush allowed the world to be painted in three dimensions, the same way a memory is not a photograph, but a feeling with edges. Brushstrokes that glow. Trees that are less solid than suggested. Fireflies that are points of light rather than modelled insects.
This approach also addressed a central practical challenge: accessibility. A world built from VR brushstrokes is inherently lighter than one filled with high-polygon assets, making the experience deliverable across a wide range of hardware, including in community and school settings where computing power cannot be guaranteed.
The Open Brush x VIVERSE pipeline made the publishing step seamless. Once the world was complete, it could be shared directly on VIVERSE and made available to anyone, with no specialist deployment and no barriers. For a team working in partnership with grassroots organizations to reach diverse communities, that openness mattered enormously.
The three zones were designed to feel connected by emotional logic rather than a single unified visual style. Each carries its own atmosphere and pacing. The transitions between them carry the weight of the project’s argument: that where we are shapes what we see, and what we see shapes what we care about.
The Events: Four Conversations Across Vietnam
During March 2026, Firefly Memories left the screen and entered the room, four times, in four very different communities, made possible by the generosity of local partners and organizations who opened their doors and brought their people.
EVENT 1 — 6 MARCH 2026 | HO CHI MINH CITY
The Spark
Where the story first met the city — a conservation workshop that opened the conversation.
In partnership with Conservation Vietnam, the first event brought Firefly Memories into a workshop in Ho Chi Minh City, a city of millions where the distance between urban life and the natural world can feel enormous, and where the need for accessible conservation education is equally vast.
The workshop format, combining the VR experience with open discussion, set the template for everything that followed. People did not simply watch; they talked about what they had felt. That conversation was the point.
Watch the recap from the Firefly Memories event in Ho Chi Minh City to witness the experience.
EVENT 2 — 11–12 MARCH 2026 | QUANG YEN
The Young Witnesses
Two days with school students in Quang Yen, where the forest felt close and the questions felt real.
The second event brought Firefly Memories to Yen Hung Primary – Secondary – High School in Quang Yen, and to an audience of school students for the first time.
Over two days, students travelled through the three spaces of the world. Through immersive storytelling and interactive activities, they shared ideas about how small everyday actions can help care for the natural environment around them. The conversations that followed were unexpectedly rich, with students drawing connections between the VR world and the landscapes just outside their own windows.
For a project designed to build emotional connection with biodiversity, reaching young people in a province that sits alongside some of Vietnam’s most ecologically significant coastline felt like exactly the right place to be.
Watch the recap from the Firefly Memories event in Quang Yen to witness the experience.
EVENT 3 — 19 MARCH 2026 | CAN THO
The Designers’ Eye
A session at FPT University Can Tho that turned a conservation experience into a design conversation.
The third event took a different angle. At FPT University Can Tho, Firefly Memories was presented as part of a technology experience program for Digital Design students, those studying Research Methods for Designers and Exhibition Display & Event Design.
Students explored the world not only as an emotional experience, but as a case study in immersive experience design, reflecting on what it means to build a virtual environment that carries a message, and what possibilities that opens for their own creative practice.
One of the more unexpected discoveries of the tour: Firefly Memories could open doors in design education just as naturally as in conservation spaces.
Watch the recap from the Firefly Memories event in Can Tho to witness the experience.
EVENT 4 — 23 MARCH 2026 | HO CHI MINH CITY
The Open Room
A day at Fulbright University Vietnam where the headsets came off and the ideas kept going.
The final event came through an invitation from Ecoverse, the environmental club at Fulbright University Vietnam, and it may have been the most generative of all.
What stayed with us was not the VR itself, but what happened when people took the headsets off. Conversations unfolded naturally, not guided, not structured, but genuinely curious. Each person came out with their own interpretation of nature, light, and everyday choices. Ideas began to take shape. Some of them will likely continue long after the session ended.
It was a reminder that conservation does not belong to any single discipline, and that the right room with the right invitation can make a story travel further than you planned.
Watch the recap at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
What We Learned
Running four events across three cities taught us things we could not have anticipated at the design stage.
The world resonated differently depending on who was in the room. For younger students in Quang Yen, the natural world felt close and recognizable. For urban communities in Ho Chi Minh City, it felt like something half-forgotten. For design students in Can Tho, it raised questions about the medium itself. For Fulbright’s interdisciplinary community, it sparked conversations that spread well beyond biodiversity.
This was not a flaw in the experience. It was the experience working as intended. Firefly Memories does not tell you what to think. It creates a space in which your own relationship to nature, whatever that is, becomes visible.
“What stayed with us was not only the VR itself, but how each person came out with their own interpretation of nature, animals, and everyday choices.”
The conversations that followed each session were as important as the session itself. The VR opened a door; the discussion was what people walked through.
The Journey Continues
Vietnam was the beginning.
The story that Firefly Memories tells, of light disappearing and of what it takes to bring it back, is not only Vietnam’s story. Biodiversity loss, the disconnection between urban life and the natural world, the question of how to nurture care without causing harm: these are conversations happening everywhere.
We are grateful to every partner, volunteer, and local organization who helped carry this project into four communities across Vietnam: to Conservation Vietnam, Yen Hung School in Quang Yen, FPT University Can Tho, and Ecoverse – Fulbright Environmental Club. And to VIVERSE, for giving this world a home that anyone can walk into.
The next stop is still being written. But the fireflies are coming with us.
Enter the Firefly Memories world on VIVERSE ➔ https://www.viverse.com/LJ3be5W or explore below, right here in this post!
Want to follow the journey or bring Firefly Memories to your community? Reach out to FIREFLORE and MINHANG.
Want to read more creator stories? Explore the Behind the Build series on VIVERSE’s blog.
