Testimony 360 transforms education with VR

History made real

Revolutionising how the Holocaust is taught in schools, Testimony 360 is a free educational programme that combines VR with digital survivor testimonies

Words Oliver Webb

The Testimony 360: People and Places of the Holocaust programme was officially launched in June 2024. This educational programme is being delivered in schools throughout the UK by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), with its development being sponsored by The Eyal & Marilyn Ofer Family Foundation in partnership with the HET and the USC Shoah Foundation.

Combining AI-powered interactive Holocaust survivor testimonies with an educational VR experience, it allows students to explore spaces related to the Holocaust. VR content was developed by Infinite Form on behalf of the HET.

Since 1988, HET has worked with schools, universities and communities around the UK to raise awareness and understanding of the Holocaust. One of its earliest achievements was ensuring that the Holocaust formed part of the national curriculum for history, where it remains today as the only historic event that is compulsory to teach.

“Testimony 360 is a groundbreaking educational programme which will revolutionise how we learn about the Holocaust, allowing young people to hear from eyewitnesses even when they’re no longer with us,” begins Karen Pollock CBE, chief executive of the HET.

“While it’s impossible to replace these survivors, Testimony 360 will help to ensure their incredible legacy lives on beyond their lifetimes, so generations to come will continue to be able to have that unparalleled experience of hearing directly from a Holocaust survivor. It will enable visits to the places where they lived, were imprisoned and rebuilt their lives. With the threat of antisemitism reaching levels not seen since the camps were liberated, this is extremely vital for ensuring young people understand what antisemitism can – and did – lead to.”

Redefining learning

Sacred Heart Catholic School in London was the first school in the UK to get to experience Testimony 360. “It was an absolute honour that my class was chosen to be the first,” says Richard Price, history teacher at Sacred Heart Catholic School.

“We have previously been lucky enough to have survivors speak at our school, but this will make sure future generations of schoolchildren get the same opportunity, even when these survivors are sadly no longer with us. Combined with the VR aspect, it allows pupils to connect with the people and places of the Holocaust like never before. It’s exciting to think about the possible wider applications this kind of tech could have for history teaching in future.”

When it came to the Holocaust sites HET wanted students to explore, the organisation was keen to find a team who were confident in developing immersive technology and could create a classroom-ready product for schools with no barriers to entry from a tech perspective. “It also needed to be a team who could support us in creating a piece of content that would be engaging and memorable. It had to capture the sites and spaces we were teaching about and frame them in an immersive way for students. Infinite Form was able to do this by building on its experiences in both creating VR content and telling stories,” says director of programmes at HET, Clementine Smith.

Infinite Form initially saw Testimony 360 go live as a tender project. The project’s production manager Kelsey Lockington says, “We had several 360 and VR projects under our belt by this time, but never one so meaningful, with such potential to have a powerful impact. That’s why the team jumped at the chance to respond to this tender.”

Testimony 360 is two experiences under one banner; incorporating innovative AI-powered testimonies into the VR experience. “The experience that Infinite Form created was the VR one, which is a collection of 360° filmed footage that users can look around and 3D digital recreations of real objects that users can interact with,” says Lockington.

“By taking this approach, we were able to capture these authentic spaces as realistically as possible, based on the personal experiences of survivors, while giving users a true sense of presence. It includes audio directly from the survivors themselves, telling the user about their journey. It’s basically set up as a linear narrative of their experience from before the war, all the way up to their liberation and then post-war experiences as well.”

Manfred Goldberg BEM is the first survivor to feature in the experience. Now in his mid-90s, Goldberg was only nine years old when World War II broke out. During the Holocaust, along with his mother and younger brother, Goldberg was deported from Germany to the Riga Ghetto in Latvia, from which the Nazis frequently selected inmates for mass shootings. From there, he was sent to a slave labour camp, where his brother was murdered. In August 1944, Goldberg was moved to Stutthof concentration camp, where he spent more than eight months as a slave worker. With other prisoners, he was sent on a death march before finally being liberated at Neustadt in Germany on 3 May 1945. He came to the UK in 1946 and has lived here ever since.

Interactive spaces

Originally, the programme was designed for 55 VR headsets to run concurrently with a synchronised playback. It’s been designed as a seated experience where users are guided by a session manager who can launch users into certain spaces or testimonies. “The headsets all have playback so that users can individually explore and interact with hotspots using gaze detection,” Lockington explains.

“There are some meaningful artefacts linked to the spaces or testimonies. Info hotspots provide more historical context for the recorded spaces, documentation and photographic artefacts. You can also move to other locations in the area or to a different angle of the same location.”

This experience for Infinite Form was unlike any other they’d worked on. “It used personal experiences from people who are still with us, which is incredible,” says Lockington. “We’re talking about people who are now in their 90s, who had gone through something incredibly traumatic in their formative years. We had to piece together exactly where they were during that period – and leading up to it – in order for us to then film in those specific locations. Pre-production was quite intense in that way, but luckily we got to work with the client pretty closely about how it would be structured.”

The studio worked with USC Shoah Foundation to record all the testimonies, and it was via USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony platform that these could be accessed in an interactive format. “One of the Holocaust survivors, Susan, grew up in a village just outside Budapest,” explains Lockington. “She spoke about the deep significance of her grandfather, laid to rest in the local Jewish cemetery during her childhood. It had been quite some time since she’d been there so, understandably, the exact location was no longer clear.

“I recall it wasn’t a simple search on Google to narrow down the correct location. A lot of investigative work went into finding the locations that were personal to the testimonies. With the museums it was more straightforward; our clients had an incredible network of contacts that we were introduced to, who gave us context about locations all across Europe. A lot of what had been communities and spaces before the war started to look totally different today. It was a huge honour to help locate spaces that were meaningful to Manfred and Susan for the VR experience.”

Bringing past to present

Infinite Form spoke with historians throughout Europe and filmed across five different countries. “There were lots of supporting documents and location permits in German, Latvian, Hungarian and Polish. I translated these into English to fill out and comply with, before then translating it back into the original language,” says Lockington.

“There was a lot of that back and forth due to the multilingual communication required. Since we’d pinpointed exactly where our filming locations were, it was very much the pre-production, where you’re doing all the logistics, shot and kit lists and the prep work before starting filming. There were several additional elements to the pre-production that we don’t normally have, but no project is ever the same as another.”

Shooting in Latvia proved particularly challenging; Infinite Form ultimately had to attempt different ways to get there. “We were trying to be as cost-efficient as possible,” adds Lockington. “The crew were travelling by van and filming over six weeks. By the time we would have reached Poland, I couldn’t have got our crew any further east because there were so many border closures due to the war in Ukraine. At that point, the safest option was to have the crew drive down into Hamburg, Germany. From there, I ended up flying them over to Latvia. It wasn’t safe to have a crew so close to the borders at that point in time.”

Infinite Form filmed everything on Insta 360 Pro 2s, and the programme is delivered on Pico Neo 3 headsets. “We had an invigilator platform for syncing playback, but it could be used on any device,” details Lockington. “It was an app-built program, and the set-up used a router so that it could be moved freely between different places. It would sync to the Wi-Fi, and then could be launched via the invigilator app.”

Reality Capture photogrammetry software helped capture all the artefacts. “We have a brilliant 3D modeller, Marcell Rideg, who did all our photogrammetry. I think there were over 56 artefacts in the end. Though it wasn’t all used, what he captured was incredible. Over the course of six weeks, Marcell took one photo at every angle for each of the artefacts and landmarks; it was a lot of work.

“We started calling it the Marcell shuffle, as he had to take one step to the side at a time, going around the subject to capture it. It’s a brilliant piece of work, and was then cleaned up and optimised.

“Something that was really special and important to the client was the fact that everything we recorded was authentic, and we took that to heart. There are no add-ins to the models or to the authentic spaces. It was an incredible job that was well worth the time taken.”

Survivor Testimonies

The last shot of filming was inside Goldberg’s house. “We only did one shoot inside his house. Manfred’s wife Shari was unwell, so the film date was pushed back to respect this and we ended up doing that last scene further down the line, during post-production. By this stage, the audio files for the testimonies with Manfred and Susan had been sent to us and we’d begun clean-up to optimise and insert them into the builds. Hearing Manfred’s story while we were piecing it all together, and having the team go back to meet him, was such a huge pinnacle of the entire process. It was so nice for everyone to meet him; he’s a phenomenal man.”

Filming 360° is significantly smaller in footprint than traditional filming. “You don’t need to have a full crew with you for 360° filming – the crew actually can’t be in the space with the subject being filmed,” says Lockington. “We have a scene of Manfred and his wife Shari sitting down in their living room, just going about their day while you – the user – are there with them. Because no one else is in the room during filming, their actions are just so natural that when you see it in headset as a user, the connection to Manfred and Shari feels authentic. I learnt so much about history working on the project, and I’m glad that future generations will have access to Manfred and Susan’s testimonies. From what we’ve heard, the feedback has all been really good – and seeing it in the media has also been positive. The prime minister has said a couple of nice words about it as well, which was lovely to see.”

For the AI testimonies created by the USC Shoah Foundation, Goldberg, alongside fellow survivors Susan Pollack OBE, Hannah Lewis MBE and John Dobai, spent five days being filmed within a green-screen rig from multiple angles at once. This was achieved using special volumetric capture cameras. They each answered over 1000 questions to ensure that their virtual selves could answer almost any question a student might ask about their experiences of the Holocaust. Pollack, Lewis and Dobai’s virtual testimonies are set to be rolled out in schools in the near future. 

“This technology is remarkable – it feels close to magic. Never during those dark days of the Holocaust did I ever imagine that one day I would see myself and my story immortalised in this way. I’ve spoken to thousands of pupils over the years – perhaps now I’ll make it millions. If this is my legacy, it will be a truly remarkable one,” concludes Goldberg.

Learn more about the role of VR in education in this article.

This feature was first published in the Jan/Feb 2025 issue of LIVE.