Spend days in the life of someone unable to afford a home in this immersive virtual reality experience from Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Interact with the environment to try saving your home, protect yourself and your belongings, and confront diminishing resources. Paired with a reading from Jeremy Bailenson's book, it counters misconceptions about homelessness tied to personal choices.
This 7-minute PC education experience requires two controllers to start and explores empathy through perspective-taking. Researchers have tested it on thousands to measure VR's impact on helping behavior, which outlasts other methods by months. It suits those interested in social science simulations that shift attitudes toward real-world challenges.
**NOTE: You must have both controllers turned on for the experience to start
World Premiere - Tribeca Film Festival 2017
This Experience is meant to be "paired" with a reading from Jeremy Bailenson's new book, Experience On Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do, Chapter 3 - Walking in the Shoes of Another. The VR provides the experience, the chapter provides the social science context and
background.
The Fundamental Attribution Error, as coined by a Stanford Psychology Professor, describes how we blame others when bad things happen to them, but blame the external situations when bad things happen to us. There is a misconception that losing one's home is due to who you are and the choices you make. Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience seeks to counter this belief.
In this immersive virtual reality experience from Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, spend days in the life of someone who can no longer afford a home. Interact with your environment to attempt to save your home and to protect yourself and your belongings as you walk in another’s shoes and face the adversity of living with diminishing resources.
Researchers from Stanford have run thousands of participants through this experience in an effort to study the effect of VR experiences on empathy. Across our studies, we demonstrate that a VR experience changes helping behavior more than other types of perspective taking exercises, and the effect lasts months afterward. While this 7-minute journey does not come close to immense burden of living without a home, researchers continue to find that VR experiences can be a powerful tool to help put oneself in the shoes of another.
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