You and three of your kindergarten classmates are sitting on the floor, playing with blocks, while the teacher helps another student with her work. All the kids on the floor start throwing blocks at one another and you join in — but when the teacher notices, you’re the only one who gets blamed.
And there’s one other difference: The other children have white skin; yours is black.
This is a scene from “1000 Cut Journey,” an upcoming virtual reality experience aimed at showing non-black people what it’s like to be African-American. It was co-developed by a team at Columbia University, led by Assistant Professor Courtney Cogburn, and one at Stanford University, led by Professor Jeremy Bailenson.
“It was important to Courtney, the idea is that these types of events happen to you every day, all throughout your life,” Bailenson said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “It doesn’t happen once. These microaggressions happen when you’re a kid when you’re a teenager when you’re an adult.”
Bailenson, the author of a new book about VR called “Experience on Demand,” said his lab at Stanford has previously tested virtual reality’s ability to educate people about the environment, or to motivate them to support affordable housing in their communities.
“If you’re going to learn about the coral reefs, why not swim around in them?” he said. “If you’re going to learn about the statue of David, why look at a 2-D picture? There seems to be some low-hanging fruits where VR actually will help. I don’t think we should blindly throw it at everything, but in those rare cases where this lesson helps, [we should].”
You can listen to this episode of Recode Decode here: https://megaphone.link/VMP8014482170
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