We have had a great experience with the VR kits we have to loan out to members. And each week here we look at a different use for VR in all sorts of areas of life.

This week we are sharing an article about an experience in Utah, giving people the opportunity to see life from a potentially different perspective than their own. Hearing firsthand about the challenges faced by African Americans trying to travel safely across the United States seems like a really good use of VR technology.

Check out the excerpt below, and click on the link to get the whole article, images.

Real life lessons learned from ‘Traveling While Black’ VR experience

“Many Utahns were recently treated an award-winning advanced technology film experience aimed at giving visitors a firsthand look into what blacks went through as they traveled the country hoping to find safe refuge in locales that might otherwise be less than welcoming to people of color.

The Salt Lake Film Society hosted an exhibit called “Traveling While Black” at the Broadway Cinema Centre in downtown Salt Lake City.

The exhibit offered “a cinematic virtual reality experience that immerses the viewer in the long history of restriction of movement for black Americans and the creation of safe spaces” in predominantly African American communities, according to the society’s website.

Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams, along with Emmy-winning Felix & Paul Studios, transported participants to Ben’s Chili Bowl — a landmark eatery in Washington, D.C., where black motorists would frequent on their travels. The diner was one of the places listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book — an annual guide published during the Jim Crow-era by New York City postal worker Victor Hugo Green.

Using virtual reality technology, viewers shared a series of intimate moments with various patrons “as they reflect on their experiences of restricted movement and race relations in the U.S., confronting the way we understand and talk about race in America.” The free, on-demand exhibit was set up in the lobby of the Broadway and was designed to resemble a seating area in the historic diner depicted in the film.

Kaysville resident Joseph Adams, 43, took in the exhibit on his lunch break. He said the use of the virtual reality technology helped make the overall experience much more profound for him.

“The impact it had on me was so much greater using this technology than it probably otherwise would have been,” he said. “As a white man growing up in Utah, it’s an insular community that’s very white, and to all of a sudden be in that booth surrounded by only African Americans — it was startling and it kind of brought it home in a way that I don’t know you could do otherwise.”

He had expected a more documentary-type experience but instead was moved by the firsthand stories conveyed in the film by people who lived them.”

You can read the rest of this article here.