{"id":4554,"date":"2016-06-18T14:35:34","date_gmt":"2016-06-18T12:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/themes.89elements.com\/definity-data\/?p=4554"},"modified":"2019-12-19T18:44:25","modified_gmt":"2019-12-19T17:44:25","slug":"blog-post-example-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lucidrealities.studio\/index.php\/2016\/06\/18\/blog-post-example-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The guardian | How history gained new dimensions"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Pinchas Gutter survived a Nazi death camp \u2013 and now his story will live on through a hologram that can answer your questions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pinchas Gutter goes out of his way to find me biscuits. In a sun-baked living room in his north London home, he opens a packet of Rich Tea, sits down and tells me about the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps \u2013 including the Majdanek extermination camp \u2013 and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n

\u201cRemembrance is the secret of redemption, while forgetting leads to exile,\u201d he says, quoting the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me this whole thing is about not forgetting. Because if you forget, you repeat it over and over again. To me, the great importance of testimony is not to forget what people are capable of.\u201d Sitting opposite him here in Hampstead, meeting his eyes and hearing his voice, the idea of forgetting this extraordinary story seems impossible.<\/p>\n

One week later I am staring into Gutter\u2019s eyes again. But these eyes are on a screen in the Alternate Realities strand of Sheffield\u2019s international documentary festival. The version of Gutter projected on the monitor is a prototype for a responsive hologram that will be wheeled into classrooms, lecture halls and museums. The idea is that the audience asks questions and pre-recorded memories from Gutter will respond \u2013 much as if you\u2019re talking to the real person. This virtual Gutter meets my gaze and tilts his head when I speak into the microphone.<\/p>\n

The project, called New Dimensions in Testimony, was thought up by concept developer Heather Maio, and was made in a collaboration between the University of Southern California\u2019s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and the Shoah Foundation \u2013 an organisation dedicated to making and archiving interviews with survivors and witnesses of genocide.<\/p>\n

The prototype involved filming extensive interviews with Gutter using an array of cameras and a specialised light stage. The team at ICT then used natural language processing software to help create an interactive version of the video footage, with vocal cues triggering responses from the pool of recorded speech.<\/p>\n

Complex algorithms dictate which responses are played back \u2013 faintly reminiscent of virtual assistants such as Apple\u2019s Siri and Microsoft\u2019s Cortana, except that while those pieces of software are primed to answer your questions about emails or the weather, New Dimensions in Testimony is based on communicating one man\u2019s experience of genocide.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t consider it an AI. I think of it more like a smart search engine which gives you a conversation-like experience<\/p>\n