Japanese students create VR experience of Hiroshima bombing
csmonitor.com
csmonitor.com
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.
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.
Cynicism is the default mode for internet denizens. Wouldn't want anybody to think they were soft enough to feel an emotion!
I loved the introduction. As much as I love war games, I despise the concept of war, and think more media should reflect the abject, stupid-as-fuck reality of it. Because it is absolutely stupid as fuck. Almost any vet would tell you that. Everything about it.
Tsutomo Yamaguchi survived not only the Hiroshima bombing, but the Nagasaki one too.
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.
I'm going to guess it's more because neither government was willing to find out if they could survive the other side's nuclear attack. Who wants to rule a country with all the major cities destroyed, transportation recked, the economy in ruins, massive humanitarian crises, etc.
The solution is to create an environment where individual decision makers are strongly incentivized to make decisions that are collectively beneficial. This is where modern telecommunication technology and - in spite of it's problems - economic globalization can help a lot: nobody wants to drop bombs (atomic or conventional) on another country if their friends or business partners live there.
How many bombs did Russia drop on Crimea during that invasion?
Russia may have had ties to local areas like Crimea, but the are not as integrated economically and socially on a global scale. Compared to e.g. US/EU relations, a lot of people in the US still see Russia as suspicious/hostile.
Russia's attempts to disguise their initial presence with astroturf "popular support" is an example of the country being increasingly aware of how they appear on the international stage. Bombs become less appealing as the economic cost of pissing off the rest of the world grows. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of work to do to create that goal.
Then of course, once mustard gas is rolling through your neighborhood, glorifying war seems rather stupid.
People are dumb forgetful creatures, but it's important to keep well in mind that war is terrible and horrible, and we as people never want it. Public opinion won't prevent another war from happening ever, but it will make war much harder to argue for.
As events in 2000-2003 have taught us, it's quite easy to sway public opinion in favor of war, even more so when it's largely not on your own soil.
Iraq/Afghanistan have been much longer than Vietnam for a very obvious reason.
Another issue is that a stronger reliance on "empathetic/emotional" learning experiences can delve too far from education and too much into propaganda. Group A can produce material that hits deep at our psyches and highlights the evils of Group B, and vice versa. Whose side wins the popular debate isn't from the facts on the ground, but from which group has the tech/production skills to make their story grip the heartstrings. In that way it's like any other over-produced documentary, but VR can have the seductive appeal that it's "more real" and thus more objective.
The issue of "experiential VR learning" becomes harder and harder to do right the further back in time you go, because of the mistake we moderns make when trying to "relate" to the past. We often imagine time-traveling and dropping ourselves in a past environment, thinking that's what it would be to be, say, a medieval peasant. We too easily forget that our own mindsets and approaches would be fundamentally different in some ways.
I'm still developing these thoughts, but I think the critical difference lays in the difference between "VR experience of Hiroshima bombing" and "watching Schindler's List."
A movie is a narrative. Otherwise it wouldn't be entertaining and nobody would watch it. Even documentaries have narratives. Narratives require good guys, bad guys, etc.
A VR "experience" is just that - one little slice of experience. I really don't think that can be biased (maybe, depending on the experience). It's just "putting yourself in someone's shoes." I don't see how anybody could be biased about how terrible a city being nuked was. It was terrible. Someone might argue that "it was for the greater good," but it was still terrible. Maybe it'll make it harder for a future (now child) president to make the decision to drop the bomb, good! Is that a biased viewpoint, to not want suffering of anybody? I guess maybe it is.
Some of the stories told at the museum are from school kids who were walking around the city during the blast. They walked through streets in intense pain, skin hanging in sheets off their bodies, trying to find their friends so they could pick them up and help them. Some of them were on fire. Some returned to their homes to find their families dead. Those same children grew up and lived full lives, and can be heard in recounted interviews at the museum.
Children are a lot stronger than many adults think.
I visited Yad Vashem when I was 16. I have been traumatized for the rest of my life. The Children's Memorial is not for children.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/30/9642790/virtual-reality-...
However if VR and haptics are able to perfectly recreate war in the next few decades, let's hope that psychology develops in pace. A generation of teenagers who have been exposed to perfect recreations of trench warfare and 9/11 is a generation that will have more PTSD than any other generation before it.
There's also the issue that such a realistic sim probably wouldn't be fun for a lot of people, and wouldn't get played that much.
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)
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?