Japanese students create VR experience of Hiroshima bombing

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2018/0806/Japanese-students-create-VR-experience-of-Hiroshima-bombing

by clebio • 8 years ago

89 49 8 years ago

creaghpatr3• 8 years ago

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.

monocasa• 8 years ago

What's the moral argument against?

mipmap04• 8 years ago

If 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• 8 years ago

There'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.

kqr2• 8 years ago

Actually I think there is already a 9/11 VR experience:

https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/30/9642790/virtual-reality-...

creaghpatr3• 8 years ago

That's a very interesting article!

cortesoft2• 8 years ago

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?

sandworm101• 8 years ago

Yes. 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• 8 years ago

At 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.

komali23• 8 years 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)

jahaja3• 8 years ago

In war games, soldiers usually die quietly, instantly, and in one piece. Reality is still too brutal.

kevinmchugh• 8 years ago

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.

52-6F-62• 8 years ago

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.

komali23• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

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.

zaarn• 8 years ago

Though less centered on a real scenario, the phosphorous section in Spec Ops The Line has had similar effects to some (including me). War isn't pretty.

dmurray• 8 years ago

Just that phrase "Hiroshima survivor" was impactful. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone survived.

Tsutomo Yamaguchi survived not only the Hiroshima bombing, but the Nagasaki one too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi

Isamu2• 8 years ago

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.

savanaly• 8 years ago

We 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.

Isamu2• 8 years ago

I'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.

agoodthrowaway3• 8 years ago

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.

jahaja3• 8 years ago

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.

goatlover• 8 years ago

It’s my strong belief that those images that prevented nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union.

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.

ng122• 8 years ago

It's a prisoner's dilemma. It only works if all nations agree to curtail aggression.

pdkl952• 8 years ago

The prisoner's dilemma demonstrates how decisions that are individually rational can create worse outcomes collectively. The incentives for the individual {prisoner,nation} are not compatible with larger group dynamics.

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.

vorpalhex• 8 years ago

Before World War 1, there was a (relative) period of some peace, and something insane happened - people started glorifying war. The idea of war bringing out the "real" in a person, or skimming off the excess of society was a thing.

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.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

Public opinion

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.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 8 years ago

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

lquist• 8 years ago

Interesting use of VR! Anybody have a download link?

bausshf• 8 years ago

Commenting, because interested too!

Japanese students create VR experience of Hiroshima bombing

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