#Lancaster bomber crew audio how to
#Lancaster bomber crew audio archive
#Lancaster bomber crew audio software

It’s estimated that between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians, including children, were killed by Allied bombing. The Commonwealth’s relationship with Bomber Command has been a complicated one thanks to the many ethical issues raised by Bomber Command’s area bombing tactics. That’s exactly what we can do with virtual reality as well. Your mother would’ve handed you a cup and said, ‘That’s a cup’ and you make a connection in your brain. Not sitting down, listening to words and having to repeat those words.

#Lancaster bomber crew audio how to

Like learning how to ride a bike, or learning languages. As you’re a child, as you’re being taught by your parents, you learn through experience. “For education, how we learn is through experience in real-life. And a lot of people wanted to be astronauts as well, and this is the closest they’ll ever get to it. “With Apollo 11 we roughly get about one in 10 people coming out of the experience in tears because they get such an emotional response from it.” “They get a lot of empathy as well for how brave these people were going up in a spacecraft like that.

#Lancaster bomber crew audio software

“We’ve had a lot of experience demoing our software at places,” says Whelan. “Whelan says this kind of emotional reaction is not uncommon and truly believes in the power of VR as an educational tool.

It's very cramped and dark inside but the atmosphere is amazing. Unfortunately, the odds were always stacked against him. 463 Squadron, an RAAF squadron operating within RAF Bomber Command, had the highest casualty rate of any Australian bomber squadron deployed to Europe during the war. Aircrew had only a 40 per cent chance of surviving a tour, making for one of the highest casualty rates anywhere Australian forces fought in World War II. The RAAF accounted for just two per cent of WWII enlistments, yet they made up nearly 20 per cent of Australian fatalities for the war. It’s a story shared by thousands of others, which is sombre stuff. He and his crew were killed in action over Dortmund Ems Canal in November 1944. He had a hard tour over 16 ops, returning heavily damaged several times and rarely flying the same aircraft for more than two missions. He was a Lancaster pilot in 463 Squadron one of several thousand RAAF airmen posted to Bomber Command in the UK during WWII. Over the years I’ve pored over my great uncle’s records and leafed through his log book, which ends with a chilling note acknowledging his failure to return from his final mission.

Your mileage from 1943: Berlin Blitz may vary but as someone with family history in Bomber Command I found it tremendously enthralling and ultimately extremely moving. So that was probably the biggest challenge for us.” On the real world you have all these particle effects and sky you have explosions going off as well, and it all has to be timed up correctly. In space you’re just looking at two spheres. The hardest part for this one would’ve been the Berlin landscape, because that’s very, very detailed. The Apollo cockpit and space is quite easy to do. “Straight away they were on board with that and they commissioned us to make it.” “It’s a little bit different because there’s more characters and more detail. “As soon as I heard the audio, I instantly said, ‘Look, what we can do is very similar to Apollo 11, where we recreate the actual events and give people a sense of what it was like back in 1943,” says Whelan. “Some of the guys in the BBC, in the VR department, actually got to try that out and they wanted to meet me so I went over and had a conversation.” The BBC presented Whelan with the Wynford Vaughan-Thomas audio recording and asked if there was something he could do with it. “That game actually used all the real audio from the event, then we heightened it with a lot of music,” explains Immersive VR Education founder and CEO David Whelan.

#Lancaster bomber crew audio archive

The use of authentic, period audio in 1943: Berlin Blitz is not dissimilar to Immersive VR Education’s debut project, Apollo 11 VR, which used original archive audio to help users experience NASA’s first mission to the moon.