Tabimachi Gate Hiroshima, the travel company that has run the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park Rest House since July 2020, operates PEACE PARK TOUR VR: an approximately 80-minute guided walk of the park in which the guide stops at five points and hands each visitor a VR headset. At each stop the headset plays a computer-generated 360-degree reconstruction rendered from the same viewpoint the group is standing in, so putting the goggles on and taking them off moves between the present-day park and the same spot in 1945. The sequence covers the Nakajima district as it was on the morning of 6 August 1945, the scorched ground immediately after the bombing, and the postwar recovery.
The VR content was developed by Fujita Corporation, the Tokyo construction firm involved in Hiroshima's postwar rebuilding, as joint research with the University of Tokyo's Virtual Reality Educational Research Center; the 360-degree imagery was produced by CAD Center. The scenes were modelled from hundreds of period photographs, and atomic-bomb survivors were interviewed while experiencing the content so their corrections could be worked back into it. The tour launched in August 2021 after about a year of development and has been taken by more than 1,000 people, including business federations, United Nations-related bodies, US university groups and corporate training parties. Sessions run daily at 10:30 for one to six guests, at 6,000 yen for adults and 3,500 yen for children aged 6 to 11.
