Immersive media is entering some of the most difficult rooms in our shared history and asking audiences to remain. By putting people inside episodes of racial harm — past and present — virtual and augmented reality experiences are transforming abstract lessons into a felt experience, and, increasingly, measurable empathy.
In Atlanta, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights is testing a phone-based AR encounter that recreates the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre along the streets where it occurred. Holographic testimony and spatialized sound greet visitors outside, closing the gap between site and story. It’s not spectacle; it’s context, an invitation to watch and then think.
How Immersive Experiences Change Attitudes
There is some evidence to suggest that well-designed immersive experiences can also cultivate higher degrees of concern for others and longer-lasting changes in attitudes than traditional media. In a study by the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab published in PLOS ONE, research subjects who underwent a very short VR perspective-taking exercise reported significantly more enduring open-minded and empathic attitudes than those who experienced similar material through reading or video, attitudes that remained measurable weeks after exposure.
Researchers who have used 360-degree simulations of conflict, for example, have found less outgroup dehumanization and more willingness to compromise among participants — suggesting that immersion can soften hardened attitudes when content is contextualized and ethically delivered. No single experience rewires beliefs, but repeated, guided encounters can construct new mental models.
Relatively apart from social issues, continuous training has been shown to offer significant benefits for empathy training that are relevant more generally. According to a PwC study of enterprise VR training, participants learned up to four times more quickly than in classrooms and felt more emotionally connected to the content — part of why hospitals and police departments are experimenting with VR modules on bias, de-escalation, and trauma-informed practice.
Real Projects Focused on Black Histories
Stories about the community are setting the standard. Kinfolk Tech employs AR to shed light on Black and Brown histories present in public spaces, which, the team says, 91 percent of users share with others — a small yet powerful indication of engagement cascading into everyday conversation.
The virtual reality documentary “Traveling While Black” by Roger Ross Williams and Felix & Paul Studios places the viewer inside D.C.’s Ben’s Chili Bowl, as elders recall the limitations of Jim Crow mobility and the Green Book period. It has been taught in classrooms, shown in museums, and used in professional trainings to spark discussion of the line from old restrictions to contemporary oppression.
In 1,000 Cut Journey, which was created by Courtney Cogburn at Columbia University and her colleagues, users become a Black male encountering racism from a young boy to grown man. Research that supports the project has found heightened awareness of methodological bias and greater advocacy for equity-centered policies, proving that embodiment can nudge people from sympathy to systemic thinking.
Museums are embracing the form cautiously. AR work by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights places visitors at the scene of racial violence while narrating from verified historical sources. The Legacy Museum, as the EJI installation is known, deploys layers and layering in its immersive installations to give shape to the throughline from enslavement to mass incarceration with a viscerality that only hard-core scholarship can provide.
Cross-ideological initiatives matter, too. The Messy Truth, a VR series that covers scenarios in which someone is treated differently on the basis of race, has been shown to far-left and far-right audiences alike, including conservative conferences and law enforcement trainings. Facilitators say getting into someone else’s skin resets debates that usually grind to a halt in abstractions.
Designing For Dignity And Security in XR Experiences
Immersive projects addressing racial harm must be trauma-informed. Best practices now include clear content advisories, opt-outs, session pacing, and structured debriefs so that viewers can process what they’ve seen. Pairing co-creation with communities affected, along with fair compensation and editorial control, acts as a bulwark against reenactment tipping into exploitation.
Privacy and accessibility are nonnegotiable. Headsets and smart glasses can record sensitive biometric signals; frameworks developed by the new XR Safety Initiative and the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethical Extended Reality provide guidance on data minimization, consent, and harm reduction. Real-time speech-to-text captions, audio descriptions, contrast adjustments, and haptic feedback make participating in video calls even more accessible for users who are deaf and hard of hearing, visually impaired, or have low vision.
The line between telling and selling is exceptionally fine. Ethical teams emphasize dignity, place scenes in context with trusted sources, and decline to use gaming-inspired rewards. They design for place, too — an AR memorial in a city street might use subtle prompts and ambient sound; a VR installation in a museum could layer facilitators and exhibits to scaffold learning.
Measuring Impact Beyond Emotion in Immersive Media
“Empathy is a starting point, not an endgame.” Programs that combine immersion with discussion guides, foundational information about policies, and local actions (like fostering independent community archives or attending restorative justice dialogues) are more likely to translate feeling into change.
Even the evaluation should be as strong as the storytelling. Mixed-methods designs can examine short- and long-term changes through validated scales of empathic concern and dehumanization, follow-up interviews, as well as behavioral measures such as signing up to volunteer or adopting new curricula. Meta-analyses warn that the effects on implicit bias are mixed, precisely why immersive media should be an adjunct to — not a replacement for — structural reforms.
Virtual reality won’t fix racism.
Yet when it trains its power on racial trauma, with clarity, rigor, and care, it can slow us down, restore some measure of attention to all the other things now yanking our nerves this way and that — and get people to feel the stakes of history and policy in their bones. There, the human connection — based in fact and transported into action — is where empathy starts to matter.