By using advanced digital humanities technologies, and making it accessible online, we can conserve, develop and preserve the memory of Europe’s cultural heritage, and in particular the Holocaust, for future generations.

Existing memorial sites or museums offer a traditional historiographical approach. We propose to use virtual and augmented reality techniques to reconstruct sites of WW-II crimes and their interrelated structures.
SPECS’s approach combines virtual and augmented reality with integrated databases of graphical reconstructions and historical sources to allow us to actively explore and try to comprehend the incomprehensible: the massive scale of the crimes Nazi Germany perpetrated on the world and the depth of the destruction and suffering it caused.

The SPECS research group has been pioneering this approach over the last 15 years and grounded it in its fundamental research in psychology and neuroscience. In close collaboration with the Bergen-Belsen memorial site and Prof. Habbo Knoch this paradigm has been elaborated to conserve and present the history of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

In 2011-2013 this work was supported by the EU project CEEDS

more information about the work done in this project can be found at http://www.belsen-project.specs-lab.com/ 

INSTALLATIONS

2012 – PRESENT. “Here: Bergen-Belsen, Space of Memory” an audiovisual installation to remember what once was.
2012 – PRESENT. “There: Bergen-Belsen, Echoes of Memory”, a sound installation for the 60 years of commemoration
2015   April-October.  Virtual reconstruction at London’s Wiener Library

MEDIA

This project has gathered some media attention and was broadcast by Dutch TV NOS  in 2015 and by Euronews Futuris in 2016 (see below)

See our other education projects: