Students use VR to recreate bombing

Just like real: A student at Fukuyama Technical High School watching Hiroshima city before atomic bomb fell in virtual reality experience. — AP

FUKUYAMA: It’s a sunny summer morning in the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Cicadas chirp in the trees. A lone plane flies high overhead. Then a flash of light, followed by a loud blast. Buildings are flattened and smoke rises from crackling fires under a darkened sky.

Over two years, a group of Japanese high school students has been painstakingly producing a five-­minute virtual reality expe­rience that recreates the sights and sounds of Hiroshima before, during and after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city 73 years ago yesterday.