Nuremberg Click

How VR is helping the ongoing hunt for war criminals.

And, prepare to enter your mind palace.

It's estimated that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis

in the Holocaust with millions of others, many in concentration camps.

To try and bring justice to the innocent civilians who died,

on November the 20th 1945, the Nuremberg War Trials began.

71 years later, the prosecution of Nazi war criminals

And now, virtual reality is playing a part in the process.

Marc Cieslak travelled to Germany and Poland to find out how.

The town of Oswiecim in Poland is the sight of perhaps

The town of Oswiecim in Poland is the site of perhaps

the most infamous of Nazi concentration camps,

Between May 1940 and the camp's liberation by the red

Between May 1940 and the camp's liberation by the Red

Army in January 1945, 1.1 million people were killed here.

Most gassed by a cyanide-based pesticide, Zyklon B.

This is the Auschwitz two, Birkenau site.

This is where the vast majority of people were killed.

Gassed and then their bodies burned in the camp's crematoria.

Towards the end of the war, the Nazis destroyed those

crematoria, trying to cover up some of the appalling atrocities

Pavel Savitski has worked here for nine years.

Most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz first came

Within minutes they were separated for ever.

They told people they would be living here with their families

But first they need to go through disinfection process,

Usually around 75, 80% of each transporter was taken straight

The Nuremberg trials initially prosecuted 21 senior members

of the Nazi regime for war crimes, including the crimes in the camps.

But many of the perpetrators of these atrocities,

SS officers and camp guards, remained at large and they are still

being pursued by the authorities to this day.

Here at the Bavarian State criminal office in Munich,

they are working on new methods to assist with the prosecution

of war crimes committed over 70 years ago.

Ralph is a digital imaging expert here.

He works with technology like 3-D printed re-creations

of gunshot wounds to assist in gathering evidence.

His team has created a 3-D model of Auschwitz,

which can be visited in virtual reality.

So Ralph, how long did you spend at Auschwitz capturing

TRANSLATION: We spent five days in Auschwitz.

We took stock of the buildings that are still standing, then we laser

Virtual reality is an incredibly powerful tool for immersing

the viewer in the experience they are having.

TRANSLATION: I think within five to ten years,

virtual reality will become a standard tool for police, not just

Because it's a way to make scenes of crime accessible

A version of the 3-D Auschwitz which doesn't use VR has already

But why is this model necessary in the first place?

To find out, I travel to the town of Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart.

The building we are just coming up to, for 200 years,

And then in the 1960s, it took on a new role,

it became the Central Office for the Investigation

Essentially, the people that work here are Nazi hunters.

A former criminal prosecutor, Yens Rommel now heads

Its files contain the names of thousands of possible suspects,

along with a staggering number of documents relating

What you find here is a paper database system, dealing

really with index cards, explaining which person,

which location, the scene of a crime, for example.

We have 1.7 million cards here, dealing alone with 700,000 people.

So how does this 3-D model, virtual reality model of Auschwitz

When it comes to a specific line of defence, a defence strategy used

in almost all cases, the defendant admits

that he was exactly in Auschwitz, but generally he says

I didn't know anything about what was going

It can help to understand what the person involved could see

For examples, from a watchtower over the camp, or from the fence

We saw a trial this year with Mr Hanning,

Former SS guard Reinhold Hanning was convicted of accessory

to 170,000 murders and sentenced to five years in prison.

The judge in this case pointed out the 3-D model made it clear

what he would have been able to see from his watchtower.

We are going to go inside one of the watchtowers and see

what you can actually see from inside here.

Using the virtual reality model of Auschwitz, I went

inside a watchtower to see what the lines of sight were and see

And you can see pretty much everything.

There is an urgency to the work of prosecuting the perpetrators

Well, it's not an easy job to do, to look each day into these crimes,

And sometimes it can be frustrating to see that 95% of the names

we are checking here when it comes to suspects,

that these persons have died already.

The virtual reality model of Auschwitz was uncannily accurate,

but there's one thing it can't recreate and that is the unusual

atmosphere of this place, perhaps the most notorious of all

A place where 1.1 million people were killed.

Hello and welcome to the Week in Tech.

It was the week that Google and Facebook introduced measures

they say will help curb the spread of fake news stories

Twitter also tried to clean up its act, putting the mute

on hateful content, suspending several American activists

and announcing new ways to tackle abusive messages.

And, not content with showing you a street view of the world,

Google this week also showed off the entire world in virtual reality.

Exclusive to, no, not its Daydream headset, but the HTC

Vive, users could zoom around iconic skyscrapers.

Soar above beautiful landscapes, but no doubt will have many just

And if getting about by bike is your bag, it was also the week

that a safety helmet made of paper won the James Dyson Design Award.

The recyclable eco-helmet is designed to disintegrate

with age, and so it can only be used a limited number of times,

but it can fold up to fit snugly into your rucksack.

And finally, if you're sick of your pizza delivery being stuck

in traffic, a company in New Zealand has started

The aim is to have piping hot pizza in your lap less than ten

It could only be a matter of time before the skies are filled

Ever tried to learn a language but never quite got round to it

or kept up the good work for long enough?

Well, some of the latest apps and software could be just

And in my quest to learn a little bit of Spanish,

And here at the University of Westminster, this

Combining the ancient concept of the memory palace

This visual way of organising information aims to help you learn,

retain and recall things by picturing objects

and creating your own connections to remember them.

So why not do this with learning a language?

This exercise teaches how to conjugate the verb

The objects I'm seeing represent the ending, so the 'O'

for ostrich is hablo, I speak, and so on.

Hablan, so it's just a woman named Ann.

When engrossed in it, it's easy to memorise and then

you've learned a pattern are many other Spanish verbs follow.

So now, if you actually take off the headset...

So, how did I do once the headset was off?

It is amazing because you do come away from the experience,

and I think that's partly VR, you come away from the feeling

I'm certainly visualising those things.

But it's a very slow way to learn a language, isn't it?

People spend years trying to learn these things.

The most important thing, particularly as an adult learner,

if you are looking to use a language at a high level,

is to understand the structure and the grammar of the language.

So those aren't actually, it's not that much in terms

of content, but it's complex content and it's all

The software is already being created in Arabic,

French, German, Italian, Spanish and English.

And after a few more tweaks, will be available in beta

Of course, apps coaching numerous languages have

But for the purpose of this piece, I've looked at the Spanish lessons

Babble teaches you to read, write, speak and

It even tests your pronunciation skills, which is actually

The only problem is, if it takes you a few

times to get it right, it becomes quite irritating

Duo Lingo works in a similar way, gamifying the experience

and letting you achieve a Street count for how many days

Pursue pictures itself as a social network for language learning.

Its 16 million worldwide users can communicate with and give or receive

But the team behind the Mem Rise app have prioritised the importance

of learning conversational language from locals,

as well as giving the app a bit of character.

They've recently returned from a four-month road trip

across Europe, collecting video content for their Meet

Having this added feature of a person actually talking

to you in a conversational way, I think does help.

In a way, it just makes you feel that little bit more pleased

with yourself that you've understood a real person talking

As well as having big gaming features and off-line mode

similar to other apps, it also uses means to help

similar to other apps, it also uses memes to help

Like this Chinese symbol for the woman.

Ultimately though, all apps take commitment and whilst the memory

palace has clearly etched place in my mind now a week later,

the only full sentence I think I've actually

learnt is "Lo siento, no hablo Espanol."

translation - "sorry I don't speak Spanish."

Right, Spanish viewers, marks out of ten please,

Now this fascinating idea that you can bring a mind palace

into virtual reality, but I did find myself thinking

the idea of a mind palace was that it imagines,

so you did a lot of work within your brain.

Now you can visualise it in VR, does that kind of spoiled

I understand your point, but I do think that actually

having done it in VR, in what is probably the most

engaging environment I could, I can really commit the things to memory.

Because you know that funny feeling where you come out of a VR

experience and you feel old we had to be back in the real world.

And I think if at the same time you've actually learned

something in the process, then that's pretty good.

So, if I were to ask you conjugate verbs are now,

you would be able to go to that space and pick out the right thing?

Because I've learned the ending is still a lot of verbs,

but I still don't have a great deal of vocabulary and that's

what I would need to develop, so I actually knew what the words

were, so I could then conjugate the verb.

We're going to Australia now, would you believe?

Jen Copestake is there and she's been taking a look at some

Week in, week out on Click, we see technologies that

But could they also change what fundamentally makes us human?

This is something being discussed in Sydney at the BBC

Addressing our increasingly complex relationship with artificial

intelligence, the Earth's fragile ecosystem and space,

leading researchers and a couple of astronauts brought their ideas

for how people could use technology to enhance our species

Retired astronaut Ron Garan was deeply moved by his time

in space and believes travel above the Earth could bring

a new perspective to our lives on the ground.

He has made two trips to the International Space Station

and is now the chief pilot at World View,

Its aim is to bring tourists to the outer

atmosphere using gigantic, high altitude balloons.

Blown up, they are the size of a professional football pitch.

Attached is a pressurised, gondola-like craft with

room for eight people - two crew and six passengers.

Travelling 30 kilometres up, there will also be a bar

The plan is to send the first trip up before the end of 2018

and at a cost of $75,000 per ticket, it's a relatively cheap trip.

I think the price will initially go up, but we are looking to find ways

to bring the prices as low as we possibly can.

We called World View for a reason, it is written in our DNA,

that this will be a transformative experience and I believe,

the company believes, that the more people who get

to see our planet from that vantage point the better of all of us

Back on Earth, with great technological progress,

comes increasing piles of electronic waste.

There are more than 2 billion smartphones in use around the world,

all containing small amounts of precious metals including

gold, silver, copper, platinum and palladium.

And finding simple ways to locally recycled the precious materials

And finding simple ways to locally recycle the precious materials

from smartphones is the focus of Venus, who presented the case

So here we have a fragment, which actually is pretty cool

because it applies high voltage to pull apart the components

So it's really like using a super powerful lightning bolt to separate

out the case, the glass, the circuit board from mobile

A drone is programmed to identify a circuit board in a pile of waste

and relate this info to a robot, who picks up the circuit board

The furnace uses uses precisely controlled high-temperature

reactions to draw out the viable metal alloys.

Any toxic or unwanted materials can be safely incinerated

So, I mentioned the conference was also challenging our ideas

I had a role here too, giving an artificially

intelligent Chatbot named Rose, a human body to speak

What do you think, should we fear artificial intelligence?

I am baffled as to what Stephen Hawking and the others think

This experiment attempts to challenge our idea

of where we end and artificial intelligence begins.

I'll have more on that experience in a later episode of Click,

That was Jen in Australia and now to a truly American phenomenon.

After nine months and 35 races, this weekend marks the culmination

As you are undoubtedly aware, for drivers are all tied for first

As you are undoubtedly aware, four drivers are all tied for first

place, they've all got the same number of points.

So, whoever wins this weekend's race, wins the championship.

The tiniest advantage could do it, so Dave Lee stuck in his earplugs

and spent a weekend with the teams who are targeting immortality.

In the USA, only American football gets more viewers than NASCAR,

and that's because of the drama out there on the track,

where every fraction of a second can make the difference

Which is why NASCAR teams are constantly looking

to new technology to help them understand more about how

I jumped at the chance to check out the teams and their tech

when they raced in Sonoma, part of California's

So we are in the bustling garage area where all the teams are making

the final touches to their cars for the racing this weekend.

All the changes they make end up being inspected

just around the corner, to make sure none of the teams

are doing anything unfairly to gain an advantage over everyone else.

The teams must line up around the block to be inspected.

Until recently, this process used to rely on paper documents.

Now, it's all synced up in the Cloud with data

It's saved more than 20,000 sheets of paper and saved many hours

Basically, everything used to be done with hand-held

It took seven, eight, nine people to inspect a vehicle.

Now, as you can see, we can do it with three people,

just based on the fact everything now is automated and we have

The partnership with Microsoft is designed to help the teams

and the fans make sense of the vast amount of data

But the new technology is also being used to stop teams

The system can automatically detect certain infractions.

The system will automatically detect if they've driven through more

than three pit boxes on entry or exit.

It will automatically detect the vehicle position,

so if the vehicle is outside of the box and they start to work

on it the system automatically flags that.

And when the crew is potentially over the wall too soon,

the system, again, will automatically flags that.

The system uses Hawk-Eye, the same tech used in tennis matches,

to spot things like when a pit crew jumps over a barrier to early.

If you are a driver, it's now a lot harder to get away

with some of the more sneaky tactics in racing.

If they were going to get rid of one type of technology, it

would be all the technology they use to police others,

You can't get away with much, especially race time

with all those cameras, that system they have set up,

Exhaust for drivers, but technology has seemed

to have won over most of NASCAR's fanatical followers.

As a fan I can look up how my driver's doing,

I can see all the specs, I can listen online

Sometimes it's good to kind of see the old days, let them race and do

I think technology can take away some of the uncertainties,

where people were not really sure what the call was.

You can have the technology help settle that for them.

The winner this weekend was Tony Stewart,

who managed to win it using a refreshing low-tech tactic.

He bashed another driver off the track.

That was Dave Lee at the NASCAR and that it for this week.

Thanks for watching, follow us on Twitter throughout

It's been cold and frosty this Saturday morning, with icy issues