On July 14, 2016, USC Shoah Foundation traveled to Majdanek Concentration Camp to build an educational virtual experience through the personal story of Pinchas Gutter, a Holocaust survivor. Pinchas, imprisoned at age eleven, was the sole member of his family to escape the camp. Returning to the site of tragedy and survival, Pinchas shared his memories as he walked through the camps for what he vows is his final visit.

The experience gives viewers the possibility to not only hear Pinchas’ words as he recounts the tragedy, but to virtually walk alongside him in the same railway car, gas chamber, shower room and barracks of Majdanek where he and his family were taken.

The details of the events take on a whole new dimension as Pinchas stands inside each vivid environment and recounts his heartbreaking story of suffering and loss.

'The Last Goodbye' user experience was designed as a linear journey through the Majdanek camp, following Pinchas Gutter and hearing his testimony in first person.

To bring this to life required groundbreaking collaboration of the industry’s top talent, who together helped create a capture pipeline. Crafting the virtual environment required dozens of photogrammetry artists and engineers, plus a photorealistic simulation of the concentration camp in the game engine Unity. New techniques were continually experimented with to keep the connection to Pinchas’ testimony.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, the experience was screened within a custom installation created by acclaimed production designer, David Korins. The ultimate goal was to build-in a contemplative pulse that people could naturally attach to their own personal landscape; to connect, not only with the atrocity of concentration camps, but grasp how inhumane man can be when hate is paramount and emerge as a more enlightened individual.

As a response to the outpour of positive press and requests from festivals and institutions, USC Shoah Foundation will not only enter ‘The Last Goodbye’ into their official archive for generations to come, but feature the experience through an international museum tour. ‘The Last Goodbye’ will also be released publicly for the first time ever in May 2017 via Within, a premiere virtual reality platform that will allow users to experience it in room scale VR.

‘The Last Goodbye’ is a powerful personal testimony of the Holocaust, preserved for the first time in poignant room-scale VR. The experience was created by USC Shoah Foundation, whose mission is to record and archive the testimonies of living genocide survivors with the aid of advancing technologies. ‘The Last Goodbye’ presents a completely new way of preserving these truths for future generations and is an example of how technology can keep the truth alive. It is an act of witness and the ambition has been to create an entirely new grammar for what’s possible within the documentary format.

USC Shoah Foundation endeavored to create the first ever Holocaust survivor testimony in room-scale VR, which will be entered into their official archive for generations to come. ‘The Last Goodbye’ presents a completely new way of preserving these truths for future generations and is an example of how technology can keep the truth alive. It is an act of witness and the ambition has been to create an entirely new grammar for what’s possible within the documentary format.

The resulting interview, recorded with advanced immersive technology, offers an unprecedented opportunity for the viewer to not only experience history through the eyes of a man who lived it, but reflect on the cruelty of mankind especially in the face of prejudice and how we can prevent such atrocities moving forward.

For over 20 years, the USC Shoah Foundation has preserved more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Shoah, each one a unique source of insight and knowledge that o?ers powerful stories from history that demand to be explored and shared.

USC Shoah Foundation wanted to reimagine how users connect to the testimonies, especially in light of recent years as the number of forcibly displace people wordlwide has hit its highest since World War II. Amid an upsurge in the number of foreign arrivals, countries across the world are beginning to enforce policies that reflect a very real and terrifying shift toward public and unapologetic xenophobia.

In light of the current refugee crisis, USC Shoah Foundation decided to create a VR testimony that would transcend past horrors and provide a call to action that is more universal and relevant than ever.