To ensure the world that each of us won't forget the dark chapters of history, such as the Holocaust and World War II-related atrocities, a group of technology-savvy scholars and researchers is creating audio-visual accounts with survivors and witnesses.

Where “Blackout” thrives in the present, “The Last Goodbye” takes a look into the past. A co-production between Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz of Here Be Dragons, the USC Shoah Foundation, MPC VR and OTOY, the experience follows Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter as he toured the Majdanek Concentration Camp in July 2016 to cope with the loss of his family. The documentary-style piece entails the viewer visiting the camp with Gutter and exploring it in ways never seen before, all while listening to his heart-wrenching story of perseverance and loss.

Perhaps the most powerful piece at this year’s Storyscapes, the Tribeca Film Festival’s annual survey of the biggest and best in new virtual reality work, was The Last Goodbye. The pieces’s concept is both simple and ambitious: to have a Holocaust survivor guide the viewer in a tour of the concentration camp where he was interned over seven decades ago.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum is using new technology to tell the stories of 13 Holocaust survivors, including 7 from Chicago. The technology takes first-hand survivor accounts to create interactive holograms, which allow for visitors to ask questions and get answers - long after the survivors have passed on.

Studios invested heavily in magnetic-tape storage for film archiving but now struggle to keep up with the technology

One of the great questions — in life, not just in VR — is how we’ll memorialize victims of mass tragedy. Technology offers myriad tools, but how to use them so that they’re effective and not exploitative? Specifically, this has been a question involving the Shoah — how will the murder of 6 million people be marked when the day comes that anyone old enough to have lived through it will have died? As the youngest survivors approach 80, it’s more than a hypothetical.