The Last Goodbye

project background:

The Last Goodbye is a powerful room-scale VR experience in which Holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter, takes the viewer to Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland where he was imprisoned and his family was murdered. A team was sent to the camp to capture tens of thousands of photos to recreate a 3D model of various sites within Majdanek, including the holding pen and the shower room. Also captured was 360 video of Mr. Gutter as he describes in detail his memories of the camp.

Variable Labs was brought into the project by Otoy, one part of the team who captured the environments using photogrammetry techniques.

challenge:

Integrate high resolution 3D models, stereoscopic 3D video, and 360 video assets into a single performant HTC VIVE-compatible application.

Solution:

The models and assets being delivered for integration were exceptionally realistic recreations of Majdanek. However, due to their high quality, many 3D assets and video were still too complex to run on high-end PCs. Variable Labs’ staff developed a pipeline for optimizing assets to run concurrently in a 3D scene on a computer running the latest generation graphics card. Our suggestions included video compression using low-CPU usage codecs, LOD strategies and optimization techniques for all 3D assets, and the use of appropriate VR-friendly lighting models.

impact:

Our contributions led to the completion of an application which was initially debuted at a USC Shoah Foundation gala and shown to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The experience was later expanded upon and entered into the Tribeca Film Festival where it received high praise for its storytelling and technical ingenuity.