Interact: A Mixed Reality Virtual Survivor for Holocaust Testimonies

In this paper we present Interact---a mixed reality virtual survivor for Holocaust education. It was created to preserve the powerful and engaging experience of listening to, and interacting with, Holocaust survivors, allowing future generations of audience access to their unique stories. Interact demonstrates how advanced filming techniques, 3D graphics and natural language processing can be integrated and applied to specially-recorded testimonies to enable users to ask questions and receive answers from that virtualised individuals. This provides a new and rich interactive narratives of remembrance to engage with primary testimony. We discuss the design and development of Interact, and argue that this new form of mixed reality is promising media to overcome the uncanny valley

Evaluation of the Interaction with a Digital 3D Testimony

Conversations with Holocaust survivors are an integral part of education in German schools and universities as well as part of the German memory culture. The goal of interactive stereoscopic digital Holocaust testimonies is to preserve the effects of meeting and interacting with these contemporary witnesses as faithfully as possible. These virtual humans are non-synthetic, i.e., there exists no underlying system, which extrapolates from recorded data to synthesize and generate new answers. This means that immersion-breaking difficulties common to synthetic virtual humans, such as the audio-visual uncanny valley, can be prevented. Issues resulting from technical constraints, technological barriers to entry or errors, machine and human alike, during the design and creation of the application cannot, however, be ruled out. Therefore, I conducted a preliminary study to evaluate how people perceive this first German-speaking digital interactive 3D Holocaust testimony. I investigated how the study participants perceived the technical and semantic quality of recording and display, the difficulties in using and interacting, the accuracy and relevance of the answers given as well as the authenticity and emotiveness of the virtual contemporary witness. In this paper, I detail how the study was set up, the results of the survey, and my analysis of the data.Zeitzeugengespräche mit Holocaust-Überlebenden sind fester Bestandteil der Bildung an Schulen und Universitäten sowie Teil der deutschen Erinnerungskultur. Ziel interaktiver stereoskopischer digitaler Holocaustzeugnisse ist es, die Auswirkungen der Begegnung und Interaktion mit diesen Zeitzeug*innen so realitätstreu wie möglich zu bewahren. Diese virtuellen Menschen sind nicht-synthetisch, es gibt also kein zugrundeliegendes System, das aus aufgezeichneten Daten extrapoliert, um neue Antworten zu synthetisieren und zu generieren. Dadurch können einige immersionsbrechende Eigenschaften, wie das audiovisuelle Uncanny Valley, verhindert werden. Probleme, die sich aus technischen Beschränkungen, technologischen Eintrittsbarrieren oder menschlichen und technischen Fehlern während des Designs und der Erstellung der Anwendung ergeben, können jedoch nicht ausgeschlossen werden. Deshalb habe ich anhand des 3D-Zeugnisses des Holocaust-Überlebenden Abba Naor eine Vorstudie durchgeführt, um zu evaluieren, wie Menschen auf dieses erste deutschsprachige digitale interaktive 3D-Zeugnis reagieren. Ich untersuchte, wie die technische und semantische Qualität der Aufzeichnung und Darstellung, die Schwierigkeiten bei der Nutzung und Interaktion, die Genauigkeit und Relevanz der gegebenen Antworten sowie die Authentizität und Emotionalität des virtuellen Zeitzeugen wahrgenommen werden. In diesem Beitrag erläutere ich die Spezifikationen des Aufbaus, die Ergebnisse der Erhebung und meine Analyse der Ergebnisse

Confronting Wartime Sexual Violence: Public Support for Survivors in Bosnia

Existing research on conflict-related sexual violence focuses on the motivations of perpetrators and effects on survivors. What remains less clear is how postconflict societies respond to the hardships survivors face. In survey experiments in Bosnia, we examine public support for financial aid, legal aid, and public recognition for survivors. First, we find a persistent ethnocentric view of sexual violence, where respondents are less supportive when the perpetrator is identified as co-ethnic and survivors are perceived as out-groups. Second, respondents are less supportive of male survivors than female survivors, which we attribute to social stigmas surrounding same-gender sexual activity. Consistent with our argument, those who are intolerant of homosexuality are especially averse to providing aid to male survivors. This study points to the long-term challenges survivors face due to ethnic divisions and social stigmatization from sexual violence

Interact: A Mixed Reality Virtual Survivor for Holocaust Testimonies

In this paper we present Interact---a mixed reality virtual survivor for Holocaust education. It was created to preserve the powerful and engaging experience of listening to, and interacting with, Holocaust survivors, allowing future generations of audience access to their unique stories. Interact demonstrates how advanced filming techniques, 3D graphics and natural language processing can be integrated and applied to specially-recorded testimonies to enable users to ask questions and receive answers from that virtualised individuals. This provides a new and rich interactive narratives of remembrance to engage with primary testimony. We discuss the design and development of Interact, and argue that this new form of mixed reality is promising media to overcome the uncanny valley

Question-Answering Virtual Humans based on Pre-recorded Testimonies for Holocaust Education.

With the continued application of gaming for training and education, which has seen exponential growth over the past two decades, this book offers an insightful introduction to the current developments and applications of game technologies within educational settings, with cutting-edge academic research and industry insights, providing a greater understanding into current and future developments and advances within this field. Following on from the success of the first volume in 2011, researchers from around the world presents up-to-date research on a broad range of new and emerging topics such as serious games and emotion, games for music education and games for medical training, to gamification, bespoke serious games, and adaptation of commercial off-the shelf games for education and narrative design, giving readers a thorough understanding of the advances and current issues facing developers and designers regarding games for training and education. This second volume of Serious Games and Edutainment Applications offers further insights for researchers, designers and educators who are interested in using serious games for training and educational purposes, and gives game developers with detailed information on current topics and developments within this growing area