New Dimensions in Testimony: Digitally Preserving a Holocaust Survivor's Interactive Storytelling
Introduction

New Dimensions in Testimony is an initiative to record and display testimony in a way that will continue the dialogue between Holocaust survivors and learners far into the future.

A collaboration between the USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, in partnership with Conscience Display, New Dimensions in Testimony will yield insights into the experiences of survivors through a new set of interview questions, some that survivors are asked on a regular basis, plus many of which have not been asked before.

The project uses ICT's Light Stage technology and records interviews with seven cameras for high- fidelity playback; as well as natural language technology, which will allow people to engage with the testimonies conversationally by asking questions that trigger relevant, spoken responses. ICT is also pioneering display technology that will enable the testimonies to be projected in 3D.

The goal is to develop interactive 3-D exhibits in which learners can have simulated, educational conversations with survivors though the fourth dimension of time. Years from now, long after the last survivor has passed on, the New Dimensions in Testimony project can provide a path to enable young people to listen to a survivor and ask their own questions directly, encouraging them, each in their own way, to reflect on the deep and meaningful consequences of the Holocaust.

The project also advances the age-old tradition of passing down lessons through oral storytelling, but with the latest technologies available.

Downloads

New Dimensions in Testimony
Overview.pdf

Publications

Evaluating Spoken Dialogue Processing for Time-Offset Interaction (David Traum, Kallirroi Georgila, Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski), In Proceedings of 16th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), Association for Computational Linguistics, 2015

How Many Utterances Are Needed to Support Time-Offset Interaction? (Ron Artstein, Anton Leuski, Heather Maio, Tomer Mor-Barak, Carla Gordon, David Traum), In Proceedings of FLAIRS 28, AAAI Press, 2015

Time-offset Interaction with a Holocaust Survivor (Ron Artstein, Stephen Smith, David Traum, Oleg Alexander, Anton Leuski, Andrew Jones, Kallirroi Georgila, Paul Debevec, William Swartout, Heather Maio), In Proceedings of IUI 2014, ACM Press

Demonstration

An Automultiscopic Projector Array for Interactive Digital Humans (Andrew Jones, Jonas Unger, Koki Nagano, Jay Busch, Xueming Yu, Hsuan-Yueh Peng, Oleg Alexander, Mark Bolas, Paul Debevec), In SIGGRAPH 2015, ACM Press, 2015

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