We are excited about sharing our VR kits with members. (Thank you to the Minnesota Dept of Education, Library Services; and to the IMLS, for the funding for this project!!) Virtual Reality kits are very cool, and we have so many good educational resources for people to share.

And we are enjoying finding all sorts of articles on different ways VR is being used to entertain and educate people, in all sorts of different areas of life.

These kits are fun, of course – learning is best when it connects with people. And that is the main focus of our VR kits: education and learning.

So this was an especially interesting article, helping people to learn about history. This is a VR showing of 1943 liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Virtual reality Holocaust:
WW2 survivor ‘impressed’ by recreation

There is a photograph of soldiers holding guns on a group of people sitting on a curb, as the ghetto was being cleared. The VR creators then filled in details to get a 360 degree view of what else was happening in the scene.

“Professor Umbach added they did not want to use the VR “voyeuristically” by showing too much violence and they had deliberately chosen not to make the image too realistic.

She said the aim is to make people think critically about photos from past or current events rather than feel they had “gone back” to the Holocaust.”