Virtual Reality for Sexual Harassment Awareness

Project Overview

In my junior year, I did a project that aimed to spread awareness and train people against harassment using Virtual Reality (VR) in academic institutes such as LUMS. Pakistan is ranked fifth in the non-sexual violence against women category and seventh in sexual violence and harassment, leading to the need for awareness of harassment. Moreover, 6 out of 10 countries in the world lack adequate policies and laws for harassment in universities and higher education institutions, and with time, it'll become more complicated for marginalized communities to study there. To tackle this problem, a user-research-based storytelling & narrative therapy at CHISEL helped me carefully gauge and identify the situation. I studied literature to find similar work done before but, unfortunately, could only find a bit of relevant work to our study. So, I reviewed every kind of literature related to harassment, including the psychological factors, use of technology, behavior change, effects of different solutions on participants, and VR immersiveness that can affect the solution. I decided to design a solution to help participants identify harassment and develop a will to act against it. Considering the effects of the first-person view in VR for such sensitive scenarios, I created a VR solution in a third-person perspective so that it doesn't trigger any past traumatic experiences of our participants and they feel safe while using it. Some of the pictures are shared below.

Then I conducted user-testing in a 50 to 50 Female to male participant ratio and got positive results. Based on the results, the project's second iteration is in progress to further improve it and add a wide range of scenarios. The study proved to be very effective in identifying sexual harassment of any sort, and more importantly, it produces will in people and victims to take a step against harassment. Currently, a 2D solution is being developed in the CHISEL as literature shows that a 2D solution or simple guidelines are more effective in telling people about harassment and a 3D solution is more effective for training against harassment. Therefore, I'll be working on comparing both these solutions to find their effects and differences. Once the project is completed and approved by relevant authorities, it'll be launched in LUMS so the upcoming batches have a clear vision of harassment and fighting against harassment. Through this project, I learned a lot of technical skills, such as Unity and assistive tech like Virtual Reality, to solve problems, and it gave me confidence that I can excel in the domain of HCI.