Museum debuts 3-D holograms of Holocaust survivors
Chicago: Seated onstage at a museum near Chicago, Adina Sella talks about her life as a Holocaust survivor. A group of young school kids is entranced — all the more so because Sella is not actually there.
Her likeness is being beamed in the form of an interactive and moving hologram, part of a firstof-its-kind exhibition debuting this weekend at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, which aims to preserve accounts of a fast-disappearing generation. “She has their undivided attention,” teacher Samantha O’Neill of Chicago’s Northside Catholic Academy said.
“It really does look like she is sitting on the stage in front of you.”
The exhibit uses voicerecognition technology and machine learning to let visitors ask questions about survivors’ World War II ordeals and hear answers that grow more relevant with time, as the technology learns.
Thirteen Holocaust survivors, most living in the United States, but also from Canada, Israel and Britain, were recorded for the exhibit. They answered thousands of questions, each sitting for about a week of high-definition video recording. “It prepares us for the day when our survivors will not be here,” the museum’s chief executive Susan Abrams said. The Nazis murdered some six million Jews, and millions of other people, in the Holocaust. As survivors age, organizations are grappling with the dilemma of how to preserve their stories.
Famed movie director Steven Spielberg in 1994 established a foundation that video recorded 55,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses.
His organisation eventually became the Shoah Foundation, a part of the University of Southern California.