The National Football League has continually tried to stay ahead of new technology, and now, as USA Today first reported, they will soon begin to use Virtual Reality to help their employees, including players, experience racism and sexism. The goal of working with Stanford University is to try and curb some of the main issues that face many workplaces around the world, including the NFL.
Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has been using their VR to help companies and people experience the prejudices that some people face on a daily basis like no other trainings or videos can. The lab will offer the NFL the ability to give their employees this unique VR experience with the help of StriVR Labs. The company, which was started by Jeremy Bailenson, Trent Edwards and Stanford graduate assistant Derek Belch, is currently being used to help college and professional football teams give their athletes a VR experience to help them train away from the practice field.
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The Virtual Human Interaction Lab designs their VR to give users a first person view of what it is like to experience certain prejudices. One example includes users being represented by an African-American female avatar who is being harassed by a white avatar. These scenarios are very immersive but there are still some larger questions about the real effectiveness of these experiences to help curb the occurrence of sexism and racism. However, diversity training as it has historically been conducted have been proven to be relatively ineffective.
This past summer NFL executives, including commissioner Roger Goodell meet with the VR team at Stanford to discuss using this technology to improve relations now, as well as to create huge improvements down the line. Troy Vincent, NFL executive vice president of football ops, is very optimistic the Interaction Lab can help the NFL. “VR can deliver on real social issues that allow people to be better…We’ll start using this as another teaching tool later this year.”
The proliferation of Virtual Reality technology has made this kind of training more realistic than ever before, as the price for the gear is becoming increasingly more affordable.
Jeremy Bailenson sees the experiences that his company and the Interaction Lab have created as one of the closest things people can get to achieving an age old adage. “Feeling prejudice by walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is what VR was made for.”
Although the NFL league office has not officially begun to use this VR technology, when they do later this year they will be embarking down a very unique and modern path of trying to increase workplace diversity and empathy.