Interact: A Mixed Reality Virtual Survivor for Holocaust Testimonies

In this paper we present Interact---a mixed reality virtual survivor for Holocaust education. It was created to preserve the powerful and engaging experience of listening to, and interacting with, Holocaust survivors, allowing future generations of audience access to their unique stories. Interact demonstrates how advanced filming techniques, 3D graphics and natural language processing can be integrated and applied to specially-recorded testimonies to enable users to ask questions and receive answers from that virtualised individuals. This provides a new and rich interactive narratives of remembrance to engage with primary testimony. We discuss the design and development of Interact, and argue that this new form of mixed reality is promising media to overcome the uncanny valley.