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Japanese students create VR experience of Hiroshima bombing
- creaghpatr 8y agoInteresting 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.
- monocasa 8y agoWhat's the moral argument against?
- mipmap04 8y agoIf it's not handled appropriately, you're potentially making a really poor-taste virtual roller coaster. It could easily be seen as making a spectacle of a national tragedy.
- DanAndersen 8y agoThere's an argument that putting children through traumatizing simulated events has unclear psychological consequences. Western education at young ages goes surprisingly graphic when talking about certain historical atrocities (think seeing Schindler's List in grade schools). While this sort of shock-and-awe storytelling can be impactful, its consequences may not be all positive. 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.
- heavenlyblue 8y agoIf watching Schindler's List is traumatizing, then what is going to happen to your kid when they actually meet someone trying to take advantage of them in one way or another?
- hrktb 8y agoAt a point it’s a matter of norm and probability. If the chances that a kid goes through that kind of experience are astronomically low, prepping them for that kind of traumatic event while encuring PTSD risks might not be worth it.
- TomMarius 8y agoAre you sure it's that unlikely?
- heavenlyblue 8y agoI would even dare to say that the moment you allow a majority of your children to grow up this way; you allow a minority of psychopaths to do whatever they want to them (the children). It’s a simple game-theoretic question.
- komali2 8y agoI'm thinking a lot about your OP. 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.
- kqr2 8y agoActually I think there is already a 9/11 VR experience: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/30/9642790/virtual-reality-9-11-experience-empathy https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/30/9642790/virtual-reality-...
- creaghpatr 8y agoThat's a very interesting article!
- cortesoft 8y agoI 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?
- sandworm101 8y agoYes. Most people who experiance modern war never see a battle. Soldiers battle. For the other 90% of the population, war is suffering, deprivation and fear.
- admiralEyebrows 8y agoAt the moment, no. VR is still in its infancy, and the experiences are distinguishable from reality in a way that they are closer to video games than real life. 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.
- oliveshell 8y agoI think there would be an important psychological difference in knowing that your life isn't really in danger, or your friend didn't really just get killed, and so on. 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.
- komali2 8y ago>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)
- volkisch 8y agoVR auschwitz when?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kevinmchugh 8y agoThe 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.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoThis 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.
- komali2 8y ago>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.
- dmreedy 8y agoFrankly, 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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoI think I would have preferred being in Hiroshima than in Nanking.
- Isamu 8y agoI 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.
- savanaly 8y agoWe could study this, right? Simply ask soldiers what the their combat experience was like and also what they think about nations starting wars, and see if there's a relationship between how much they've been exposed to the "horrors of war" however you define it and how they feel about war in general.
- Isamu 8y agoI'm saying convincing the people that war is bad doesn't stop wars. For example at the start of WWII the German people were not enthusiastic about starting another war. That was not enough to stop it.
- agoodthrowaway 8y agoMy 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.
- jahaja 8y agoI 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.
- megamindbrian2 8y agoMeanwhile https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/student_counterstrike_map_texasschool/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/student_counterstri...
- pc86 8y agoWhat does that have to do with anything?
- megamindbrian2 8y agoBoth of these are about creating a virtual experience, one is presented as study and the other got someone expelled.
- megamindbrian2 8y agoCome on, no one else sees this as a double standard?
- pc86 8y ago1. Japanese students create a view-only virtual reality experience of a horrific national tragedy that killed over 140,000 people and altered the region, their country, and the world forever. 2. Highschool kid makes a Counterstrike map of his school.
- lquist 8y agoInteresting use of VR! Anybody have a download link?
- bausshf 8y agoCommenting, because interested too!
- phoebus 8y agoJapan, the criminal has kept crying for the penalty it suffered all through these years through artful ways: cartoons, music, women, children, and now VR. Can it cover the criminals it had done? NO!
- afroboy 8y agoWhat ever happened a nuclear bomb is criminal act in itself and considered a terrorist attack, at least Japan stopped being criminal not like USA were they still justifying their terrorism.
- mhh__ 8y agoWhere do you draw the line between a nuclear weapon and so many other forms of modern warfare?
- afroboy 8y agomodern warfare can be very specific, nukes can't. The only use for nukes is to kill the maximum people and it's going to be big cities where civilians exist. Are you going to use nuke bomb to kill 10, 15, 2000 people? of course not.
- phoebus 8y agoI know someone will not like my comments, haha If a son sucks on his criminal father's fortune, this son is still a criminal. Truth hurts.
- jghjg 8y ago'merica