Assistant professor of social work at Columbia University, Courtney Cogburn and her team created a project named 1000 Cut Journey to highlight the social realities of racism.
In this immersive virtual-reality experience, the viewer becomes Michael Sterling, a black man, encountering racism as a young child, adolescent, and young adult.
Assistant professor of social work at Columbia University, Cogburn and her team have created the project in collaboration with Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. The virtual reality experience put users in the body of Michael Sterling through stories based on real-life experiences.
Essentially, it’s a first-person simulation of the racism faced by a black male, for non-blacks to experience temporarily.
You empathize with Michael’s experiences of discrimination through his childhood, adolecense and adulthood. The scenes in the story revolve around the incidents of being stereotyped and treated unfairly.
In some of the striking parts of the film, 1000 Cut Journey places you in Michael’s shoes at age 15 having his first encounter with the police; age 30, interviewing for an elite corporate job.
1000 Cut Journey is only of the good examples how virtual reality can immerse us in fantastical narratives for such socially compelling issues. Especially when the VR devices becomes more accessible and less bulky, the impact would be more prominent.