During its Week of Holocaust Remembrance, Stephen Smith and Pinchas Gutter helped the College of Saint Elizabeth not only honor the past, but also consider the future of Holocaust remembrance and education.

A story on the CBS This Morning show about the latest in digital moviemaking technology made sure to note that the technology isn’t just for making imaginary creatures and movie stunt doubles – it’s also being used to create fully interactive displays of Holocaust survivors.

Development took a major step forward this month for New Dimensions in Testimony, the three-dimensional, fully interactive display of Holocaust survivors created by USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display. Audiences had the chance to interact with the pilot for the first time.

Doris Lazarus is a docent at Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, the first institution to pilot New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT), a collaboration between USC Shoah Foundation and USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), in partnership with concept developer Conscience Display.

Over the past few years, USC Shoah Foundation has embarked upon two interactive media projects which have already emerged as groundbreaking endeavors in the field – the “New Dimensions in Testimony” project, and this year’s The Last Goodbye immersive virtual reality experience that has made waves at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade.

USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Stephen Smith delivered remarks Friday at a special event at the United Nations marking the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the international law that defined genocide and held perpetrators accountable. The observance also featured a demonstration of the Institute’s Dimensions in Testimony interactive biographies that enable people to ask questions and instantly receive pre-recorded responses from Holocaust survivors.

USC Shoah Foundation has launched a path-breaking online teaching tool to enable students and educators to ask questions that prompt real-time recorded responses from Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter. The tool will be available at no cost through a new activity in the Institute’s flagship educational website, IWitness.

The Last Goodbye virtual reality experience is now available on Oculus Rift. Four years ago, Pinchas Gutter traveled back to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, where he had been imprisoned as a child during the Holocaust. In this emotional journey, Pinchas shares his firsthand testimony of what he saw and experienced there and invites you into the spaces and memories with him.

‘Dimensions in Testimony Education’ is the first version of the groundbreaking technology available for instruction in classrooms around the world. Teachers and students can ask questions that prompt real-time response from a pre-recorded video of Pinchas—engaging in virtual conversation and redefining inquiry-based education.

The Institute congratulates Lesley Stahl and her 60 Minutes team for winning a 2021 Gracie Award for their segment “Talking to the Past,” which focused on Dimensions in Testimony and featured live as well as virtual interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Pinchas Gutter, Eva Kor, Aaron Elster and Max Eisen.

Making DiT accessible at no-cost to educators and students through IWitness provides students anywhere in the world with the opportunity to have a conversational experience with survivors of the Holocaust and other witnesses to history. And at the Holocaust & Genocide Centres in Johannesburg and Durban, that’s exactly what students did, with a total of 400 learners interfacing with an interactive recorded video of Pinchas, a Jewish survivor of six Nazi concentration camps.

Liberation75 and USC Shoah Foundation partnered on a virtual student program, “Stories are Stronger than Hate: A Call to Action,” hosted by actor/director Mike Myers, with special guest Akim Aliu, Co-founder of Hockey Diversity Alliance, on Monday June 22. Through the personal narrative of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter and other stories, participants explored how stories create the possibility to learn about ourselves, about others and about how we can affect the change we want to see in our communities right now.