Anne Frank House Virtual Tour
VR Review ★★★★☆
Quest Quest Link Free Education History Museums Travel Comfortable Roomscale Stationary
The Anne Frank House Museum is an essential destination for many visitors to Amsterdam, offering an important reflection on the tragic true story of a teenage diarist during the Second World War. Forced into hiding in cramped conditions with seven other people during the occupation of Amsterdam, Anne Frank's diary provides vivid descriptions and the museum serves as both a memorial and a timely reminder of the consequences that can result from social extremeism.
This VR experience recreates the spaces and conditions in which the families lived, perhaps providing a level of immersion not available from an actual visit to the mostly bare rooms of the real-life hiding spaces that are now the museum.
Here the rooms are recreated with a level of graphical detail that is not fully realistic, yet enough to portray the cramped conditions in which the families lived. Spaces are populated with furniture, decoration and items that would be familiar to Anne. Perhaps it would have also been helpful to include representations of the people living in these rooms to give a better impression of the claustrophobic living conditions, but the choice was made to keep the rooms unpopulated. We also wonder if there was a missed opportunity here - a way of using the immersion of VR to express the constant and existant threat that the families were subjected to in their daily lives in confinement.
Anne Frank and Fritz Pfeffer's room.
Anne Frank House VR requires you to start with the story mode, which begins with a brief illustrated narrative followed by a tour of the building. Navigation of the rooms during story mode is strictly a linear affair, requiring you to progress through narrated diary sections and to pick up a couple of selected objects in turn from each room. The tour may have benefited from a more free-form approach to discovery that gives the user a sense of achievement for finding things.
There is also a rotating 3D model of the families' hiding spaces that is available after completing the story mode and tour, but only discoverable by restarting the tour mode. We suspect that people who don't re-enter the tour may miss this entirely, and it was an oversight not to include this as part of the story mode.
Anne Frank House VR is a meaningful and important tour and we'd recommended it to people of all ages. In some ways this experience might be as good as a visit to the actual Amsterdam museum, though we would have preferred more than just 25 minutes of content, possibly with opportunities for deeper dives into the Anne's library and more historical background. We've added some links at the end of our article for people who would like to learn more than this program has to offer.
This experience is also an excellent alternative for those who do not have the mobility to navigate the museum's cramped spaces and multiple flights of stairs.
3D model provides navigation, but not in story mode.
Summary:
Immersive. Arguably goes beyond the museum experience
Both stationary or roomscale movement
Clumsy but comfortable navigation
Limited learning, with just 25 minutes of content
Not available outside the Meta Quest storeSupported Languages:
Dutch English French German Hebrew Portuguese Spanish
External Links:
AnneFrank.org YouTube:Trailer
Product Links:
