Japanese high school pupils have produced a five-minute virtual reality experience that recreates the sights and sounds of Hiroshima immediately before, during and after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city 73 years ago.
By transporting users back in time to the moment when a city was turned into a wasteland, the students at Fukuyama, within the Hiroshima prefecture, and their teacher hope to ensure nothing similar ever happens again.
The bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 in 1945 killed 140,000 people.
Three days later, a second US atomic bomb killed 70,000 people in Nagasaki.
Japan surrendered six days after that, ending World War 2.
"Even without language, once you see the images, you understand,'' Mei Okada, one of the pupils working on the project at a high school in Fukuyama, 100km east of Hiroshima, said.
Wearing virtual reality headsets, users can take a walk along the Motoyasu River prior to the blast and see the businesses and buildings that once stood.
They can enter the post office and the Shima Hospital courtyard, where the skeletal remains of a building now known as the Atomic Bomb Dome stand on the river's banks, a testament to what happened.
The pupils, who belong to the computation skill research club at Fukuyama Technical High School, were born more than half a century after the bombing.
- BPA
