Vantage Point
Two events are at work at Vantage Point:
One is a company that innovatively uses Virtual Reality to help women fight racial and sexual abuse, either verbal, or physical, or both, and either online or offline.
Two, the rising incidence of online abuse in the latest tech advancement: Metaverse.
For purpose of clarity for you, we shall detail them separately, and when you’re through with the story, you will see how they relate.
Vantage Point develops modules to help people learn to combat racial and sexual abuse in the online and offline world, including workspaces. The modules use Virtual Reality to simulate near-exact situations of real life, and how victims can react to, and fight back, in such situations.
And who should be the innovator in this industry but Morgan Mercer, a biracial, and a survivor of both racism and sexual harassment.
She founded Vantage Point in 2017, which uses photorealistic characters and immersive situations “to heighten the emotional stakes” of the experience, ‘photorealistic & immersive’ being key words here. And how and why it works is as she describes to Protocol: “Much like in the real world, the things that you do influence the outcome you have, and so if you speak up sooner, things get better.”
Companies and their employees are a sizeable segment of her market and Vantage Point has immersive modules for potential victims to detect and tackle racial discrimination and sexual-harassment in the workplace.
Protocol reports that employees role play as victims, offenders, or observers, in programmed real-life situations to help employees learn to handle realistic situations, where they then analyze how their actions affect their circumstances, for better or worse.
Mercer’s company secured its place in Gartner’s Top 25 Enterprise Software Start-ups to watch. Not surprising, because how the product works and where it fits reveals enormous potential. The company has raised a total of $4.2m in funding over 3 rounds, the last funding being May, 2020.
Speaking to Fast Company in 2019, Mercer said that traditional methods hadn’t delivered the ability to apply learning to real-life environments and situations. In fact, advocates point to research suggesting employees retain more information through VR training than traditional modules.
In her talk with CNN Business in August 2020 on VR Tackling Racism In The Workplace, she said, ‘I realized how effective it is in truly putting you in a person’s shoes. Giving you a first person experience of what it’s like for somebody to flinch every time you walk by them, or what it’s like for somebody to yell words at you on the street, or what it’s like for somebody to stand a little bit too close.”
Explaining her product, CNN in this article wrote: “If you were at work and one of your colleagues made a racist remark, would you challenge it or let it pass?” This scenario is one of the many that Vantage Point provides in its training program to tackle racial discrimination in the workplace. The company offers courses on diversity, inclusion and unconscious bias. Using virtual reality (VR) headsets, employees are immersed in scenarios based on real events, where they watch a scene of discrimination unfold and are asked how they would respond.”
Of course, Claire Schmidt, CEO and founder of AllVoices has a caution: “You have to make sure you’re not triggering a post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) by putting them in a situation that is similar to something traumatic they’ve experienced in the past. Given how realistic these VR platforms and programs are.”
The Metaverse Incident
In any story about Vantage Point what immediately connects is immersive tech and Metaverse.
Immersive Tech can feel so real that Chanelle Siggens, a woman who reported being groped in VR, told the New York Times, “When something bad happens, when someone comes up and gropes you, your mind is tricking you into thinking it’s happening in the real world. With the full Metaverse, it’s going to be so much more intense.”
As the NYT story explains, “Bad behavior in the Metaverse can be more severe than today’s online harassment and bullying. That’s because virtual reality plunges people into an all-encompassing digital environment where unwanted touches in the digital world can be made to feel real and the sensory experience is heightened.”
In the same story, Ms. DeGrazia noted that Mr. Zuckerberg has described a Metaverse where people can be fitted with full-body suits that let them feel even more sensations, which she said was troubling.
In layman’s terms, the difference is this: In Web 2.0 of the 2000s, and later Social Media, you had text comments from those on your platform, or smileys and GIFs. In the Metaverse of now, you have a person in front of you, in the form of a male or female body, obstructing you, or touching you inappropriately, nay groping, and by using anonymity, may like to play out his or her fantasies or dreams.
As a male avatar shrugged at Chanelle Siggens in the NYT story, as if to say: “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s the Metaverse – I’ll do what I want.”
It’s not funny that women who come to play online games to find ways to relax and enjoy themselves, end up joining Support Groups against online sexual and other abuses.