Exactly ten years ago, I decided to make a virtual reality application. I did not know Unity. I did not know C#. I learned enough of both in approximately two weeks and built Window to the World—to the best of my knowledge, the first Romanian VR application released on a public app store.
The application is still listed on the Meta Store:
https://www.meta.com/experiences/window-to-the-world/977682772321493/
But the project did not begin with VR. It began years earlier with photography and a simple frustration: a photograph could preserve light, colour, composition and detail, but it could not fully preserve the physical sensation of being there.

Photography Without a Drone

In 2013, I started experimenting with ways of giving my photographs depth and movement. I did not own a drone, and consumer drones were not yet ordinary photographic tools. If I wanted a camera movement through one of my landscapes, I could not simply return to Iceland, France or Bulgaria and fly through the scene. So I tried to reconstruct that movement from the photograph itself.
I separated the images into elements, recreated the areas hidden behind foreground objects, built approximate geometry in 3ds Max, projected the original photographs onto it and added reflections, displacement, animated water and camera movement. It was not the usual two-dimensional parallax effect made from a few flat layers. The photographs became limited three-dimensional environments. They still worked only within a restricted range of movement, but inside that range the camera existed in something closer to an actual space.
I documented the process here:
https://aurelm.com/2013/12/15/fernweh-3d-parallax-photography-tutorial/