The Black Tuesday Experience

Abstract

My project aims to unearth a significant but often untold history of the precursors to independence in the Bahamas—Black Tuesday. Because of a lack of written documentation about many of the events, it will also integrate the preliminary collection of oral histories to help tell this story from a number of different perspectives, to preserve for generations to come. The decision to use virtual reality in The Black Tuesday Experience is reliant on the fact that it is an empathetic engine, meaning it places users into the experience, it allows for full immersion thus altering the user’s thoughts about an event. The Black Tuesday Experience uses virtual reality to overlay historical pieces of media on top of contemporary backgrounds and voices; listening to historical stories told with modern technology changes history into an entertaining art form. The premise of this project is to allow people who are interested in history to hear the oral histories of Bahamian people and to gain a better understanding as to why the event ‘Black Tuesday’ was so important in Bahamian history.