Project to walk schoolkids through troubled black orphanage in virtual reality
HALIFAX — Gerry Morrison’s childhood memories of life in the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children are painful, but he has agreed to re-live them so a ground-breaking virtual-reality project can ensure future generations will never forget.
The 64-year-old is one of three narrators who will take students wearing Oculus Rift headsets on simulated walks through the now-vacant orphanage on the eastern outskirts of Halifax, once the pilot project is prepared for four Grade 11 classrooms by the fall of 2018.
Sent to the residence as an infant in the early 1950s, Morrison said his earliest recollection of the residence was of being in a bathtub with four other children when another resident defecated in the basin.
The matron blamed him, and ignored his denials, he said.