“Virtual Reality Gives a History Lesson to Young Students”

I first meet Pinchas Gutter, he is dressed in a sweater vest. His hands form a bridge with his fingers. Gutter sits comfortably in a relaxed posture in a chair surrounded by cameras. The room is dark, with an eerie sense of silence. Eager, he begins by telling his personal story of himself as a young boy from Poland during the Holocaust.

But it's just me and Gutter himself in the comfort of my very own home.

When Gutter was just 7 years old, the war began. He then lived in a Warsaw ghetto, where he survived six Nazis camps during the course of the second world war, in particular the Majdanek extermination camp. Gutter tells me he endured through the death march spanning across Germany and Czechoslovakia.

As I watch Gutter in the midst of his storytelling, I am taken back to a quote by Baal Shem Tov in my memory, ”Rememberance is a secret of redemption, while forgetting leads to exile, ” founder of Hasidic Judaism. Tov continues, ”To me, the great importance of testimony is not to forget what people are capable of...”

But for now, forgetting seems impossible.

As I watch, Gutter is projected on a monitor in the form of a hologram.

This technology isn't new. The Alternate Realities Project littoral presents Gutter’s virtual interview at the Sheffield’s International documentary festival. This virtual technology allows Gutter to answer any possible question one could ask from the other side of the screen.

And Gutter will answer.

Like in realtime, this virtual technology allows us to speak to the hologram, as if a real person. The project is called ‘New Dimensions in Testimony,’ conceptualized by director Heather Maio, who has united with the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies and the Shoah Foundation, which made the interviewing of the survivors and witnesses of genocide possible.

Maio says, “...Not the technology that goes around it and makes it work...the 12 Holocaust survivors have been interviewed to advance intelligent computer learning and its ability to track what recording has said and adjusts the order of its responses to fit.”

The technology does, however present some ethical concerns. For instance, is the person behind the screen, much like Gutter himself, being interviewed as a real person? There is definitely some question of ethics and authenticity conveyed here.

So are the answers from Gutter or Artifical Intelligence (AI)?

“In a way, it’s both,” says David Traum, director for natural language research at the ICT. The answers are from Pinchas himself and the responses are all his. Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Shoah Foundation, says they should consider ‘New Dimensions in Testimony’ to have an activated search engine reiterates, “Machine Learning will enhance its intelligence as time goes by, training the system...I think of it more like a smart search engine which gives you a conversation-like experience.”

The project is winning several awards, including the Interactive Award and Audience Award at the Sheffield Document Festival earlier last month.

Eye contact maintenance hit a rather instinctual degree. The whole interview encompassed a melange of clips directed by speech recognition software. An imminent project, ‘Anne,’ is a virtual reality documentary chronicling the life of Anne Frank during the Second World War, featuring a scene of her secret annex where she had hid from the Nazis regime.

Through keeping the Holocaust alive through interaction and tangibility, it is a rather serious and ethical mission, and it is not dangerous by any means. If at all, it is a form of immersive entertainment.

In other VR documentaries like, ‘Dancing with Myself,’ Jane Gauntlett portrays her perils with living with epilepsy.

The concept of a virtual reality interview may be upsetting viewer’s comfort by ultimately thrusting them into a world not quite like their own. For instance, ‘The Enemy’ by war photographer Ben Khelifa documents Israeli fighters via his IPad. As the avatars leer at you and articulate with you, all audio feedback is taken from actuall interviews. 3D figures are modelled on interviewees.

This gives you as a viewer a sense of physicality, eye contact, and body language. Anyone can watch with a sense of innocence and respond as if they were in the same room as the subject. The approach does more than just show a recording of the principal object. It portrays a particular moment in history.

The Shoah Foundation Institute is cognizant of the responsibility of showing the subject as a whole person, to portray them in a given context, and to clearly represent Pinchas Gutter in a deliberately truthful manner to their audience.

Gutter affirms, “I saw myself sitting there, moving my hands and legs, being a presence and speaking to people,” he tells the world. “Not just speaking but answering. In other words, I’m listening. I’m not just speaking, I’m listening.”

Gutter elaborates that he didn’t speak much at all about the Holocaust for years after the war, but when he finally did, he found it very liberating. He hopes that years after his death, his legacy can still live on through the two-way technology. Gutter hopes he can share his message to live audiences, “It helped me alleviate some of the pain and the difficulty of relating to people,” he says. “I tell them when they speak to me: now you have a piece of me and I have a piece of you. We’re joined together now, in both the good and the bad that can happen.”

Nevertheless, this virtual reality technology spans all human interaction. Educators have brought this technology to the forefront of the classroom setting, hoping that their students will catch a favorable glimpse into history by the usefulness of artificial intelligence technology itself.

Ted Green, am educator at McCutcheon High School, was able to virtually teach his students about Eva Kor and her survival at Auschwitz thanks to virtual reality technology.

Green says, "Even though it's only about a fifteen minute program, they walk away feeling a little bit different than they did by reading a book or by seeing the film.”

Will we, as the world, ever contribute to history through AI? Can we send a message of our own for others to learn about our story for future generations? Will we ever possibly know what the past was like?

Perhaps not. Presumptively there’s no way to recreate the real virtue of speaking to another body—a true embodiment of the misfortunes, the tribulations, the conjunctions of what it’s like to be human.

But projects like New Dimensions in Testimony are working on it though, and it’s the next thing we have in the 21st century.

Finished with the interview with Pinchas Gutter, he leaves me with, “To me, this is such a vitally important project. It’s beyond value. There’s almost something holy about it.”

Finished with the interview; I pause, soaking it all in. I doff my VR headset, unplug and sit in silence. I am taken aback by Gutter’s courage, aptitude, and longing to give answers from the past in order to help create history for our future generations.

Thank you, Gutter.

Written by J. J. Richards