Anne Frank House VR
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We (the Anne Frank House) teamed up with Force Field VR and Oculus to create the Anne Frank House VR. We launched the VR tour on Anne Frank's 89th birthday: 12th of June 2018.
- http://www.annefrank.org/en/News/News/2018/Anne-Frank-House-VR-launch/
Anne Frank House VR
We launched a virtual reality tour of Anne Frank's hiding place: Anne Frank House VR. The tour gives a uniquely immersive experience of the hiding place of Anne Frank and the seven other people in the Secret Annex. In the tour all the rooms of the Secret Annex are furnished in the style of the time spent in hiding. The tour lasts for around 25 minutes, is available in seven languages and can be downloaded free of charge from the Oculus Store.
Anne Frank House VR shows the furnished rooms of the Secret Annex. Force Field VR has used the latest VR visualisation technology in combination with intensive manual work to arrive at a photorealistic result, all on the basis of extensive historical research.
The real Secret Annex is empty. The furniture was removed by order of the Nazis after the arrest of the eight people in hiding. It was the wish of Otto Frank, Anne's father, to leave the rooms of the Secret Annex empty. Otto Frank was the only one of the eight people in hiding to survive the war. After his return from Auschwitz he devoted himself to the publication of his daughter's diary and the preservation of the Secret Annex and its opening to the public.
The VR experience will be installed at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam to enable visitors with restricted mobility to see the Secret Annex, as it was in the hiding period, with other sites including the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin and Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in New York rolling out later this year – giving more people around the world an opportunity to see for themselves what the space would have looked and felt like.
We created a virtual Secret Annex, the place where Anne, her family and four others hid for more than 2 years during WWII. This experience is made in VR and allows people to engage with and learn about the story of Anne.
In 1942, during the second world war, Anne Frank, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family were forced to go into hiding to escape persecution from the Nazis. For more than two years, the Franks and 4 others would live in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building in Amsterdam, sharing the burden of living in hiding in confined quarters with the constant threat of discovery and subsequent death.
The Anne Frank House VR offers a unique and emotional insight into these two years. You can experience the world-famous Anne Frank House in a never before seen way. You travel back to the years of the second world war and wander through the rooms of the Annex that housed the group of 8 Jewish people as they hid from the Nazi persecution.
You can immerse yourself in Anne’s thoughts as you traverse each faithfully recreated room, fully restored in VR, the way it looked like before ill fate hit the Annex and its brave inhabitants.
Based on Anne Frank’s diary, historical research and available originals, we created 3D models of the rooms and all the items that once furnished the hiding place. Items that we can’t show in the museum, or that were lost after Anne and the other people in hiding were arrested.
This experience vastly expands our audience. Although 1.3 million people visit the Anne Frank House every year, this is not possible for many others, either due to financial limitations, or because the steep stairs and narrow corridors limit those with restricted mobility.
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