It had been a long week and Renee Firestone was tired. But when a group of students showed up on Friday at the dark studio where she had spent days answering questions about her life, her mood quickly brightened, her energy restored.

Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor will be in Los Angeles next week to film an interview for New Dimensions in Testimony, USC Shoah Foundation’s three-dimensional, interactive virtual encounter with Holocaust survivors.

Stephen Smith will give a keynote address and New Dimensions in Testimony will be demoed at the festival's Alternate Realities interactive exhibition.

In just one week, the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival will showcase USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony project as an example of one of the most cutting-edge new technologies in storytelling and virtual reality.

The Future of Storytelling Festival in New York City is including New Dimensions in Testimony as an example of emerging technology for telling meaningful, immersive stories.

USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive New Dimensions in Testimony proved once again to be a popular and educational way to learn about the Holocaust when it was presented at the Future of StoryTelling Festival (FoST FEST) in New York earlier this month.

On the heels of filming its first-ever Mandarin-language testimony last week, New Dimensions in Testimony added another language to its repertoire of genocide survivor interviews: Holocaust survivor Nimrod “Zigi” Ariav’s Hebrew-language testimony, filmed this week at USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

The fourth museum installation of New Dimensions in Testimony kicked off last week at CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. It will remain open to the public for the next three months.

On Thursday, Oct. 27th, I witnessed history in the making. Nanjing Massacre survivor Xia Shuqin flew from Nanjing, China to Los Angeles to record a 3-D audiovisual testimony in Mandarin for USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony. For those of you who watched USC Shoah Foundation’s Instagram story that day, I was the intern behind the camera.

New Dimensions in Testimony will be on display at Holocaust Museum Houston until May 30 as part of the museum’s artistic exhibit “A Celebration of Survival.”

Over the past few years, USC Shoah Foundation has embarked upon two interactive media projects which have already emerged as groundbreaking endeavors in the field – the “New Dimensions in Testimony” project, and this year’s The Last Goodbye immersive virtual reality experience that has made waves at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade.

Museum visitors can now interact with the testimonies of Holocaust survivors Sam Harris, Aaron Elster and Fritzie Fritzshall, in addition to Pinchas Gutter, three weekends a month from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

New Dimensions in Testimony has been a work of passion for USC Shoah Foundation since 2010. After years of development at the University of Southern California including with USC Institute for Creative Technologies and with content developer Conscience Display, the program is now reaching audiences in museums around the world.

For six months this spring and summer, I had the pleasure of leading a team of staff and volunteers facilitating the beta run of New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) from USC Shoah Foundation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. I watched people of all ages approach the giant monitor displaying an image of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, first with trepidation, then curiosity, then, at last, affection. Here are a few things that I learned about technology and humanity from the project.