
Japanese students create VR experience of Hiroshima bombing - clebio
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2018/0806/Japanese-students-create-VR-experience-of-Hiroshima-bombing
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kevinmchugh
The most meaningful day of my college career was a guest lecture by a
Hiroshima survivor. Just that phrase "Hiroshima survivor" was impactful. It
hadn't occurred to me that anyone survived.

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.

Trying to understand the trauma experienced in those days and weeks and months
afterwards will always be very difficult. The smells described won't be
present in VR. A 90-minute lecture by a soft-spoken septuagenarian was hard to
bear.

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.

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52-6F-62
This reminds me also of the playable prologue to Battlefield 1. Before you get
to play the rest of the chaotic typical crass online environment you have to
play through a series of situations centred around a person you’re introduced
to before getting dropped into a messy battle where the character inevitably
is killed.

Unfortunately judging by the comments you’ll hear online after playing through
the emotional introduction, it doesn’t seem it makes a lasting impression on
many.

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dmreedy
Frankly, I'm of the opinion that that's because it was an equally crass
attempt at stimulating that kind of emotional investment. You don't get
feelings for free. They are contextual things with many more dimensions that
what is put immediately in front of you. Trying to build a genuine commentary
on the nature of war into a game like that requires a fundamentally different
kind of game, and attitude towards game-making, more than just a tacked-on nod
to the fact that some people died in the War.

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ruytlm
I found it unexpected and sobering, even if it was a 'tacked on nod'. It
certainly changed the way I played the single player campaign.

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Isamu
I don't know if this would be a highly controversial opinion here, but I think
that teaching people about the horrors of war isn'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.

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.

Let me add: visualizations like this are important, I think. I am not arguing
against these, I'm just saying these probably don't produce political change.

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agoodthrowaway
My view is that the images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed people to see
the destructive power of these weapons and the horrors of the wounds
inflicted. It’s my strong belief that those images that prevented nuclear war
between the US and the Soviet Union. I also strongly believe that without
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’d have seen nuclear exchanges between nation
states.

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jahaja
I can't read this in any other way than just speculation for which the primary
purpose is to act as a comforting rationalization to what happened.

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agoodthrowaway
I think you are very naive if you think the images of survivors didn’t do
anything to prevent nuclear war. Of course there is no “evidence” because how
could you prove something like this. Also it’s your own bias and perhaps your
politics that leads you to believe that I’m rationalizing.

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jahaja
I didn't say that images didn't do anything. In addition, I would expect
someone to call me naive, not for what I wrote, but rather if I'd thought that
what stops powerful people from doing horrible things are images of suffering
civilians.

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creaghpatr
Interesting article, can definitely see the potential for learning/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 'experience' 9/11 or any other historic catastrophe.

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cortesoft
I mean, we have video games that depict both world wars, with very realistic
recreations of major battles. Does being in war make it fundamentally
different?

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komali2
>Does being in war make it fundamentally different

Do you mean, like, is there an experience difference between "being there" and
experiencing a highly realistic VR simulation?

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding because the questions seems to answer
itself... "yes, of course!"

Besides the obvious fact wherein if you get shot you die for good, and if you
don't die you'll feel tremendous pain and be potentially maimed for life,
you've got other factors such as

-Friends you've developed closed bonds with being killed next to you

-A campaign lasting months or years that consumes your existence

-Terrible food

-No sleep

-Extraordinary boredom in downtime (which doesn't exist in videogames or nobody would buy them)

-The endless question of "why are we here" (which doesn't exist in videogames - we are here to have fun)

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cortesoft
I wasn't asking if a VR experience is different than reality.

I was asking if this new experience of the atomic bomb in VR is different than
the other WWII games we have, some in VR.

Basically, if war video games based on real wars are ok, are other games based
on real, horrible, events ok?

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lquist
Interesting use of VR! Anybody have a download link?

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bausshf
Commenting, because interested too!

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think I would have preferred being in Hiroshima than in Nanking.

