Overview

Anne Frank House VR launched

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June 12, 2018 — Today, on Anne Frank's 89th birthday, the Anne Frank House, Force Field VR and Oculus launch a virtual reality tour of Anne Frank's hiding place: Anne Frank House VR.

The tour gives a uniquely immersive experience of the hiding place of Anne Frank and the seven other people in the Secret Annex. In the tour all the rooms of the Secret Annex are furnished in the style of the time spent in hiding. The tour lasts for around 25 minutes, is available in seven languages and can be downloaded free of charge from the Oculus Store.

Multilingual and free of charge

The virtual reality tour lasts for around 25 minutes and is available in seven languages: Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew. Anne Frank House VR is free of charge and can be downloaded from the Oculus Store for Samsung Gear VR and the recently launched Oculus Go headset from Oculus and Facebook.

Latest technology

Anne Frank House VR shows the furnished rooms of the Secret Annex. Force Field VR has used the latest VR visualisation technology in combination with intensive manual work to arrive at a photorealistic result, all on the basis of extensive historical research. 

Empty Secret Annex

The real Secret Annex is empty. The furniture was removed by order of the Nazis after the arrest of the eight people in hiding. It was the wish of Otto Frank, Anne's father, to leave the rooms of the Secret Annex empty. Otto Frank was the only one of the eight people in hiding to survive the war. After his return from Auschwitz he devoted himself to the publication of his daughter's diary and the preservation of the Secret Annex and its opening to the public.

‘The VR tour gives people all around the world the opportunity to explore Anne Frank's hiding place as it was in July 1942 to August 1944, the period when Anne Frank was forced into hiding and wrote her diary. The tour offers an immersive experience.’

Educational use

The VR tour will be installed* at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam to enable visitors with restricted mobility to see the Secret Annex, as it was in the hiding period, with other sites including the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin and Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in New York rolling out later this year – giving more people around the world an opportunity to see for themselves what the space would have looked and felt like.

(* From 2024, this will no longer be the case)