Putting the User Into History: US Holocaust Memorial Museum virtual Kristallnacht Exhibit

The latest project from my company, Involve, Inc, is a virtual exhibit of "The Night of Broken Glass" - Kristallnacht. For those unfamiliar with this, it's the 1938 pogrom in Germany when violence toward Jews spilled out into the public and became open and systematic. We worked with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to create an interactive, multimedia-rich exhibit with Second Life to showcase basically, "What would it be like the day after Kristallnacht?"

This project is a prime example of the immersive and simulation advantages to virtual worlds. What we can do that we can't do on traditional flat-web is put the person into the scene, to see it from a first person perspective. Photographs are certainly very important to learning about historical events, but by putting the user into history, it's an experience that will soak in and have a deeper and longer lasting impression on the visitor.

Rather than simply pass along a press release about Involve, Inc's latest project, I thought I'd do up a quick video, post it on our YouTube channel, and embed it here. Rik Panganiban has beat me to the punch.



So I'm very proud of this work and my team. This was a surprisingly small team and a very short-life-cycle project. We had Drew Stein and June Peoples doing project management and client liaising, Ian Tepoot as our talented project creative director, lead texture artist, graphic designer and audio editor, Trevor Finney as lead 3-D modeller, Michael Adams as texture artist ... and myself as overall manager of technology, programmer and tech/art integration manager.

It was a tricky project because of one pervasive question: "How realistic do we make this and not make the exhibit too intense for people to bear?" We solved the question, for the most part, but not doing the *night* of Kristallnacht, but doing it as if you're a reporter discovering the scene the day after. There are some exhibits that are almost like flashbacks in time, where you see certain things happen.

I'm very satisfied with the result. You can check it out yourself by logging into Second Life and heading to "US Holocaust Museum1" sim.