Imagine being a person of color employed at a university and overhearing your colleagues make disparaging comments about you because of your background. Or standing at a street corner, and having a bad encounter with police. 

University of Arizona associate professor Bryan Carter doesn’t want you to just imagine it in your head. He wants to you to view it a first-person perspective. 

“Being able to immerse someone into a context like that is much more impactful — just like studying abroad and being immersed in another culture is much more impactful than reading it and watching a video," said Carter, who's also the director of UA Center for Digital Humanities. 

Carter’s team received a $50,000 grant from the university to bring this project to life. They are working create two scenarios similar to the examples given above. One will be fully immersive visual and audio experience, created with a high-resolution 360-degree camera, that users can dive into by wearing a headset. The second will be an augmented experience, designed to be viewed through a mobile device or tablet. Users will be be to scan the environment they are in, and through augmented reality, view and interact with a police officer. The responses they give the officer will determine their experience. 

This technology may help reach new demographics that prefer learning through more visual and interactive methods such as young people, Carter said. 

“This may be one way to reach them differently or maybe even capture the attention of those who would never pay attention to this stuff until they were the ones in those shoes," he said. 

Carter hope to start using this technology in diversity trainings and orientations for students and new employees this fall.