Project

The Secret Annex

The project I chose is “The Secret Annex” from the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The Anne Frank House is a “museum in the house where Anne Frank went into hiding.” Anne Frank is the author of The Diary of a Young Girl. She began writing her diary when she was 13 in 1942 and continued writing as her family went into hiding from the Nazis. Because her and her family were Jewish, they had to go into hiding since the Germans occupied the Netherlands, where they lived and the Germans were starting to deport Jews. Her family hid in the secret annex for two years until they were arrested along with the others hiding there in 1944. Anne Frank was sent to a concentration camp and died there in 1945. Her father, Otto Frank, was the only survivor of the family and helped with publishing the diary and creating the museum.

This is an image of the cover of the book with
a picture of Anne Frank on it from Amazon.

The Secret Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid was connected to the workhouse that Otto Frank rented. The entrance to the annex was hidden behind a bookshelf. But the real life version of the annex is smaller and more cramped than the virtual version.

The middle house is the house where Anne and her family hid.
From the Anne Frank House website.
A virtual rendering of the cross section of the house. The tan color is all where the warehouse, office, and storage of the business was. The white section is where Anne and her family hid. From the Anne Frank website.

The Secret Annex from the website is a 3D virtual rendering of the Secret Annex that Anne Frank and her family lived in. It looks a lot bigger than it is in real life, so you can move around and look at things better. On the website, you can move through the house by clicking on the door icons and look at the different rooms by moving your mouse. Hitting on the little lines icon brings you information about a certain aspect of the house and the play button icon will bring up a YouTube video on the topic by the Anne Frank House.

Throughout the years

While the Anne Frank House has offered a virtual 3D tour since 2010, there has been drastic changes and updates throughout the years.

The original version that was on the website was released in 2010 for the 50th anniversary of the Anne Frank House. This version was created by “LBi Lost Boys and Anne Frank House.”

This is an example of what it looked like in 2010. Source.

The current website version was “designed between 2016 and 2018 by DOOR/IN10 and built by Maykin Media, the technical developer.”

This is a screenshot from the current version that is on the website.

It’s “an online version of the Ocululs VR of the Secret Annex – Anne Frank’s hiding place.” The VR version was released by “Force Field VR and Oculus” in collaboration with the Anne Frank House in 2018. The VR version, similar to the the website, is a 3D VR version of the Secret Annex. But the VR version also has a story mode that contains narration of pages from the diary.

Press play on the video on this page or you can go to the video to see an example of what the VR version looks like. When you press play, you can use your mouse to grab and click to look around or you can use the arrows in the white circle on the video.