New Dimensionsin Testimony

New Dimensions in Testimony is acollection of testimonies designed asan interactive educational tool topermit students far into the future to“talk” with Holocaust survivorsabout their life experiences. evalue is to provide an intimate expe-rience with eyewitnesses to historywho are uniquely qualified to reflecton life.

Extending the Conversation of Testi-mony

For more than 70 years, Holocaust sur-vivors have recounted their stories thousandsof times to tens of thousands of people allover the world, providing invaluable insightsthat shape and inform perspectives. As a partof those encounters, people have asked ques-tions in their own words about issues thatare important to them.

A handful of Holocaust survivors whohave already sat before a camera for USCShoah Foundation’s Visual History Archivewill give testimony again for New Dimen-sions in Testimony. This time, however, theywill sit before 52 cameras arranged in a rigto capture a three-dimensional recording ofthem telling their stories in a new way, byanswering questions that people are mostlikely to ask.

New Dimensions in Testimony is cur-rently in development, a collaboration be-tween USC Shoah Foundation and USCInstitute for Creative Technologies (ICT), inpartnership with concept developer Con-science Display. It will eventually be avail-able at selected museums and learninginstitutions around the world to enhanceUSC Shoah Foundation’s mission of keep-ing voices of the Holocaust and other geno-cides alive for education and action.

New Dimensions in Testimony will incor-

porate interview content recorded with ad-vanced filming techniques, next-generationnatural language processing, and specializeddisplay technologies to deliver a learning en-vironment where a survivor will answerquestions as if he or she were in the room.

USC Shoah Foundation and ICT com-piled the questions posed for New Dimen-sions in Testimony from a variety of sources,including hundreds of students and mem-bers of the public. In all, more than 2,000questions have been compiled, covering avast range of subjects.

“It is amazing to think with NewDimensions in Testimony, I will beable to hold the same type of con-versation with future generationsthat I have now when I go out tospeak to students. It is a truly gooduse for technology.”Survivor Pinchas Gutter

Students and the general public will“meet” moving images of survivors, andwhen they ask a question, “natural language”technology software will retrieve an appro-priate response from a database of the sur-

vivors’ answers, creating an interactive dia-logue. Some audio-visual recordings of thesurvivors will be projected via two-dimen-sional screens, but in appropriate settingsnew visualization techniques pioneered byICT will display the survivor in three di-mensions to provide an experience as closeas possible to face-to-face interaction. Thisemergent technology will allow viewers tosee the survivor from any vantage point andwill be adaptive, changing lighting to blendwith the display environment. Whether in aclassroom or a museum setting, it will lookand feel realistic, enabling the survivor tomake “eye contact” while responding conver-sationally, with answers that are authenticand spontaneous.

Advancing Technology for HumanityThe key element of the project is the abil-

ity of the system to interpret questions beingasked and find the most relevant response.ICT pioneered the natural language under-standing technology that is used in New Di-mensions in Testimony to provide viewerswith a truly immersive experience. Whetherpeople ask, “Where were you born?” “Do youbelieve in God?” “How did you survive?” Theplayback technology enables the survivor toseamlessly answer the question posed and isable to recognize similarities between wordpatterns in questions and answers. ICT hasdeveloped a number of virtual human char-acters with this capability, for a variety ofpurposes. For example, they are used fortraining clinical psychologists and soldiers toconduct different kinds of interviews orlearn to recognize when someone might belying.

ICT has pioneered techniques for 3-Ddisplay, allowing a survivor to be recorded,transmitted, and displayed to an entire groupof people—no 3-D glasses required—whileappearing to make realistic eye contact withthe remote audience for compelling telepres-ence. This data is processed into video seg-ments that can be played back verbatim,precisely as the survivors delivered them. Theplayback system, which is still in develop-ment, allows the testimony to be viewed in

3-D from the front, as if it were given in aclassroom or museum setting, diffusely lit toblend with the environment.

The technology is so new that words suchas “hologram” and “avatar” fail to accuratelydescribe New Dimensions in Testimony.What sets New Dimensions in Testimonyapart is the ability to engage conversationallywith the survivor by asking questions thattrigger relevant, spoken responses.

Years from now, long after the last survivorhas left us, New Dimensions in Testimonywill be able to provide a valuable opportu-nity to engage with a survivor and ask themquestions directly, encouraging them, each intheir own way, to reflect on the deep andmeaningful consequences of the Holocaust.Being able to ask a survivor questions willallow students to be active participants intheir learning and develop important com-munication and critical-thinking skills.Being able to ask their own questions willteach students things about the Holocaustthey never could learn from just reading ahistory book. By providing valuable points ofview from someone who was there, studentscan better understand the human story be-hind the Holocaust and understand the im-pact it had on real people in a manner that isresponsive and engaging, making historymore relevant to their lives.

Conscience Display envisioned the ideaand brought it to USC Shoah Foundationand ICT. USC Shoah Foundation supportsthe overall coordination and production ofthe project, advises and consults partners incollection development, coordinates imple-mentation in a museum setting, and workswith other partners to develop the questions.USC Shoah Foundation will also preservethe video testimony files and resulting meta-data (questions and answers). ICT is devel-oping all technology for the project;

advanced filming, natural language process-ing, and display technologies.

A pilot installation is currently being de-veloped with the Illinois Holocaust Mu-seum and Education Center.

Funding for New Dimensions in Testi-mony was provided in part by Pears Founda-tion and Louis F. Smith.

New Dimensions in Testimony is expand-ing the scope of research in the field ofHolocaust and genocide studies and repre-sents a compelling addition to the nearly53,000 eyewitness testimonies currently inUSC Shoah Foundation’s Visual HistoryArchive.

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