Its been more than a year in planning but we’re now very excited to announce a truly groundbreaking project which we’re working on in partnership with Lighthouse in Brighton. With funding from Screen South and the Heritage Lottery Fund ‘Lives At War‘ is a pilot project that will allow schoolchildren to engage with filmed history in an immersive, investigable way by recreating scenes from archive WW2 film footage in a 3d virtual environment.

Working with Screen Archive South East, an oral history expert and an historian, pupils will receive training and learn the skills needed to explore and research archives and will learn how to conduct oral history interviews. They will then be able to discuss their experiences in the virtual world with older people who can still remember the War.

We’re currently working on the build so can’t give too much away at this stage. However we can tell you that we’re creating a monochrome world representing an English town scene of the 1940s. The environment uses game mechanics to draw ‘players’ in to the lives and experiences of air-raid survivors, through a number of task-based activities. We’re building content in Maya and using Unity as the game development environment which allows for very high quality graphics and access to the world through a simple browser interface.

The project is being trialled with Year 10 (14 – 15 year olds) schoolchildren later this year. We’ll post more details here once the project is live but in the meantime here’s a sneak preview!