Sergeant Richard Taylor never said much about his experiences during World War II, but many of them come to life in D-Day: The Camera Soldier.

This groundbreaking app for Apple Vision Pro lets you experience the fateful day like never before. Using Taylor’s footage and still photos, D-Day: The Camera Soldier places you alongside American troops moments before they hit the shores of France, offering an immersive view from inside an American military barge.

As a photographer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Taylor witnessed some of the conflict’s most crucial events. Though Taylor was a firsthand witness, he rarely discussed his time overseas, even with his family. “He only talked about the war in bits and pieces,” says his daughter Jennifer Taylor-Rossel.

“All of a sudden,” Taylor-Rossel says, “you’re seeing and hearing what my dad and other soldiers experienced that day.”

Thanks to Taylor’s bravery—and his sharp eye for photography—D-Day: The Camera Soldier captures the chaos and uncertainty of combat. There are vivid shots of warships making their way across choppy waves, young men huddling together just before combat, and stunned soldiers being treated for their injuries.

D-Day: The Camera Soldier also documents the long-term effects of war, following Jennifer Taylor-Rossel as she attempts to understand her father’s time during World War II. It all makes for a moving narrative that spans generations.

“This whole thing has been an emotional journey,” Taylor-Rossel says of the making of D-Day: The Camera Soldier. “I’m trying to honor my father’s memory. He left me with a story, and I want to get it out.”

The creation of D-Day: The Camera Soldier was the result of patience, persistence, and luck. After Taylor’s death in 2002, Taylor-Rossel and her sister began going through his belongings, including several boxes of items from his military career: letters, clothing, even old food rations.

There were also numerous decades-old photos Taylor had taken between 1943 and 1945. During that time, he chronicled major World War II events like the Battle of the Bulge and the Malmedy Massacre in Belgium. As Taylor-Rossel dug through volumes of black-and-white photos, she grasped the significance of what her father had left behind.

“The only way we know the story of World War II is because of the photographers,” she says. “They could go anywhere they wanted, and they were often the first ones in. They should have their place in history.”

In the years that followed her father’s death, Taylor-Rossel undertook efforts to share his archive with the public. Her big breakthrough came in 2022, when she received a text message from Joey van Meesen, a European war historian. He wanted to know if she was interested in seeing footage her father had shot during D-Day—footage that, until that point, Taylor-Rossel wasn’t sure existed.

She eventually teamed up with TIME Studios as well as Emmy-nominated nonfiction studio Targo, the creator of the immersive documentaries Rebuilding Notre Dame and JFK Memento.

“We designed D-Day: The Camera Soldier for Vision Pro from the ground up,” says Targo CEO and cofounder Victor Agulhon. “We wanted to leverage all the levels of immersion available on Vision Pro—from a floating window to a fully immersive interactive environment. It’s unleashed a whole new level of realism.”

D-Day: The Camera Soldier incorporates decades’ worth of visual storytelling, from grainy black-and-white war footage to interactive 3D photography. To ensure those elements flow together smoothly, the story unfolds using an approach Agulhon describes as “progressive immersion,” opening with older archival materials before introducing the more immersive elements.

“We wanted to bring users from a world they know to a world where they have control over things,” Agulhon says. “And we wanted to make sure it wasn’t complicated, so anybody could use this.”

Examine some of Taylor’s military mementos—including his dog tags, medals, and canteen—through vivid 3D photos that can be moved and rotated. You can also get up close with the nearly 30-pound film camera Taylor had with him on the morning of June 6, 1944, as he headed toward Omaha Beach.

Taylor’s footage from that day is combined with narration from letters he sent back home. He describes the mood of the soldiers as they prepare to land on the shore, where they’ll face what Taylor calls “seven hours of hell”: a barrage of snipers, shrapnel, and machine-gun fire. Taylor himself would be shot less than a minute after hitting the beach, leaving in his left arm a hole “large enough to insert an egg,” as he describes it.

Even with his injury, Taylor kept shooting, turning his camera toward his fellow soldiers as they regrouped on the beach, where they awaited orders and tended to the wounded.

In 2024, while working on D-Day: The Camera Soldier, Taylor-Rossel traveled to Normandy to visit the beach where Richard Taylor had been injured. Although she struggled to connect with her father when he was alive, being able to bring his work to others has made her feel closer to him.

“I have all this history sitting in my house,” she says. “It’s cathartic to get it out there.”

As a lover of history, Taylor-Rossel hopes D-Day: The Camera Soldier helps young people understand not only what her father went through in World War II but also what all soldiers experience during combat.

“People forget what the human part of war is like,” she says. “It’s not pretty. It’s not a game. People are killed. I’m hoping this will get young people to think about that.”