Cultural Reality - A VR Experience (2019)

Curators: Nathan Snyder, Parrker Burgan, and Hannah Wind | University of Minnesota | April 2019

Collection Editor: Isabel Pedersen
Acquisitions Editor: Ann Hill Duin
Collection Archivist: Sharon Caldwell

Many schools, organizations, and other groups have begun to explore the world of Virtual Reality (VR) and how to use it to innovate storytelling techniques. VR, not to be confused with Augmented Reality (AR), is an interactive experience typically portrayed through a device that offers both audio and visual experiences, which are inputted by an external computing device.

VR allows people to think about society from a cross-cultural perspective that has never been experienced in this way before. Our collection contains a variety of text and video artifacts encapsulating multiple themes explored through the medium of VR. They feature a variety of cultural contexts as a means to analyze social, psychological, ethical, educational, and global perspectives through the use of VR. We dive deeper into this principle of an interactive storytelling experience that provides participants the chance to have an altered perception of time and space. Some artifacts help to frame the serious issue of immersing ourselves with the future world. With the possibilities of VR, there are constant opportunities for further development, and improvement.