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Virtual reality recreates Bloody Sunday
"Bernard Shaw at Eighty" is the name of
a chapter in a book by Edmund Wilson called "The
Triple Thinkers". In it Wilson cites that "the
result of the depression of the 1880s was a revival of
socialist agitation... The ´insurrectionism` of
the period reached a climax in the ´Bloody Sunday`
on November 1887, when the socialists, at the head of
a working-class demonstration, invaded Trafalgar Square
and were routed by the police". There is another
"Bloody Sunday", which happened in Londonderry
on 30 January, 1972, when British soldiers opened fire
on civil protesters, killing 14 of them.
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The Savillle Inquiry that investigates
what happened exactly decided to recreate the city
through virtual reality technology, with the 80 "hotspots"
or key locations, and the witnesses can move around
360 degrees within a virtual panorama while they explain
what they saw and heard. Lord Saville described the
tool as "spectacular". The task was very
difficult because 30 years have passed, you have 1,500
witnesses, and the city in which the event happened
has changed. |
The software, which took fourteen months to be made,
at each location stitches together photographs from all
angles to create a canvas which you can spin to find any
view. It allows the witnesses to choose where they want
to go, what they want to view, and to point to what they
saw.
Malachy McDaid, senior developer with Northern Ireland´s
Council for the Curriculum, said that "When a witness
talks about gunfire of a specific event, they can draw
on the screen, rather like you see in a sports programme,
and the computer records this". McDaid, who had a
cousin killed then, said also that "some of the people
who come forward to the inquiry have been emotionally
affected by the software. In many respects it has brought
back the ghosts of what happened".
Virtual reality, which has been mainly connected to computer
games, is now on the threshold of a new era, when it can
"catapult witnesses back to a moment frozen in their
memories", as ABCNews describes. The package has
won a host of awards and international attention, most
notably from lawyers who think similar techniques could
be used in other trials and enquiries.
Related news:
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