EDUCATION
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with such potential to have a powerful impact. That’s why the team jumped at the chance to respond to this tender.” Testimony 360 is two experiences under one banner; incorporating innovative AI-powered testimonies into the VR experience. “The experience that Infinite Form created was the VR one, which is a collection of 360° filmed footage that users can look around and 3D digital recreations of real objects that users can interact with,” says Lockington. “By taking this approach, we were able to capture these authentic spaces as realistically as possible, based on the personal experiences of survivors, while giving users a true sense of presence. It includes audio directly from the survivors themselves, telling the user about their journey. It’s basically set up as a linear narrative of their experience from before the war, all the way up to their liberation and then post-war experiences as well.” Manfred Goldberg BEM is the first survivor to feature in the experience. Now in his mid-90s, Goldberg was only nine years old when World War II broke out. During the Holocaust, along with his mother and younger brother, Goldberg was deported from Germany to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia, from which the Nazis frequently selected inmates for mass shootings. From there, he was sent to a slave labour camp, where his brother was murdered. In August 1944, Goldberg was moved to Stutthof concentration camp, where he spent more than eight months as a slave worker. With other prisoners, he was sent on a death march before finally being liberated at Neustadt in Germany on 3 May 1945. He came to the UK in 1946 and has lived here ever since. INTERACTIVE SPACES Originally, the programme was designed for 55 VR headsets to run concurrently with a synchronised playback. It’s been designed as a seated experience where users are guided by a session manager
who can launch users into certain spaces or testimonies. “The headsets all have playback so that users can individually explore and interact with hotspots using gaze detection,” Lockington explains. “There are some meaningful artefacts linked to the spaces or testimonies. Info hotspots provide more historical context for the recorded spaces, documentation and photographic artefacts. You can also move to other locations in the area or to a different angle of the same location.” This experience for Infinite Form was unlike any other they’d worked on. “It used personal experiences from people who are still with us, which is incredible,” says Lockington. “We’re talking about people who are now in their 90s, who had gone through something incredibly traumatic in their formative years. We had to piece together exactly where they were during that period – and leading up to it – in order for us to then film in those specific locations. Pre-production was quite intense in that way, but luckily we got to work with the client pretty closely about how it would be structured.” The studio worked with USC Shoah Foundation to record all the testimonies, and it was via USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony platform that these could be accessed in an interactive format. “One of the Holocaust survivors, Susan, grew up in a village just outside Budapest,” explains Lockington. “She spoke about the deep significance of her grandfather, laid to rest in the local Jewish cemetery during her childhood. It had been quite some time since she’d been there so, understandably, the exact location was no longer clear. “I recall it wasn’t a simple search on Google to narrow down the correct location. A lot of investigative work went into finding the locations that were personal to the testimonies. With the museums it was more straightforward; our clients had an incredible network of contacts that we were introduced to,
Taking this approach, we were able to capture these spaces as
realistically as possible while
giving users a true sense of presence”
Over six weeks, the Infinite Form team visited and filmed sites that were meaningful in survivors’ stories
Enlisting the help of experts across Europe allowed the project to provide stronger historical context and validity
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