Japanese students create VR experience of Hiroshima bombing

The most meaningful day of my college career was a guest lecture by a Hiroshima survivor. Just that phrase &quot;Hiroshima survivor&quot; was impactful. It hadn&#x27;t occurred to me that anyone survived.<p>The professor translated as this woman, now old, described a week of her life when she was a very small child. She saw some absolute horrors. Not all of them were unique to nuclear weapons. Traditional aerial bombing has some awful outcomes.<p>Trying to understand the trauma experienced in those days and weeks and months afterwards will always be very difficult. The smells described won&#x27;t be present in VR. A 90-minute lecture by a soft-spoken septuagenarian was hard to bear.<p>The Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta has a great exhibit to simulate the abuse lunch counter sit-in protesters had to endure. The museum is all-around excellent and that exhibit in particular is a highlight.

I don&#x27;t know if this would be a highly controversial opinion here, but I think that teaching people about the horrors of war isn&#x27;t what stops war. It is the governments feeling the pain of war, such that they enact safeguards against easily going to war, and established norms to prevent the slaughter of civilians.<p>I may be mistaken, but I rarely see good faith efforts to, say, curtail the unchecked ability of the executive power to simply plunge into a de facto war without much direct authorization, or to use weapons such as the atomic bomb against civilians.<p>Let me add: visualizations like this are important, I think. I am not arguing against these, I&#x27;m just saying these probably don&#x27;t produce political change.

Interesting article, can definitely see the potential for learning&#x2F;empathy here. Ethically (in the US), I wonder how VR modules like this will be received. I see a case for and against a VR module that allows next gen students to &#x27;experience&#x27; 9&#x2F;11 or any other historic catastrophe.

Interesting use of VR! Anybody have a download link?

I think I would have preferred being in Hiroshima than in Nanking.