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

Home life: the meaning of home for people who have experienced homelessness

‘Home’ is widely used to describe a positive experience of a dwelling place (shelter). It is about a positive emotional connection to a dwelling place, feeling at ‘home’ in a dwelling place, where both physiological and psychological needs can be fulfilled. This portrayal of ‘home’, however, is not always how a dwelling place is experienced. A dwelling place can be a negative environment, i.e. ‘not-home’, or there may be no emotional attachment or investment in a dwelling place at all. Both circumstances receive little attention in the literature. This research explores the realities of ‘home’ by delving into the ‘home’ lives of seventeen individuals who had experienced a range of different housing situations, including recent homelessness, moving to a (resettlement) sole tenancy and then moving on from that tenancy. Participants were asked to recall their housing histories, from their first housing memory as a child up to the time of interviewing. For each housing episode, they were asked to describe the circumstances of their life at the time, for example relationships, employment and education. They were also asked to reflect on their housing experiences. Similarities and differences of experience are explored according to gender and type of housing situation. This research tells the story of lives characterised by housing and social instability, often triggered by a significant change in social context in childhood. As such, the fulfilment of both physiological and psychological needs was often constrained, and experiences of a dwelling place were more likely to be negative rather than positive, although ‘home’ could be found in the most challenging of circumstances, and often in the most unlikely of places. The participants’ constructions of ‘home’ and ‘not-home’ were largely focused on a singular feature, unlike the broader social constructions of ‘home’. ‘Not-home’ was characterised by physical insecurity, whereas ‘home’ was characterised by emotional security, with many characteristics mirroring human needs, of which ‘positive relationships’ was the most common feature. Many participants, however, had limited experience of, and/or struggled to forge and maintain, ‘positive relationships’, they lacked ‘social capital’, which meant having to navigate through a life of instability pretty much alone. As such, this research proposes a new narrative of ‘relationship poverty’, in which a lack of ‘positive relationships’ hinders the fulfilment of needs, and therefore the possibility of feeling at ‘home’ in any dwelling place

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

Feminism, Abortion and Disability: irreconcilable differences?

There has been considerable discussion of the political allegiance between the feminist and disability movements, but the question of abortion remains a thorny one. Disability rights advocates have been keen to demonstrate that it is possible to believe in a woman's right to sovereignty over the body and, yet, be opposed to the selective abortion of an impaired foetus – describing the latter as a form of 'weak' eugenics. The aim of this paper is to show that whilst there may be some points of agreement between the feminist and disability movements on the question of abortion, there exist fundamental and irreconcilable differences