Virtual Reality for Sexual Harassment Awareness

Project Overview

This project explored how virtual reality can be used for sexual harassment awareness and response-readiness training in academic environments. The goal was to design an immersive experience that helps users identify harmful behaviors and understand the importance of taking action, while avoiding design choices that could unnecessarily trigger distress.

The project was developed at CHISEL and combined literature review, user research, narrative design, VR scenario development, and user testing. It required careful consideration of ethical design, participant safety, perspective-taking, trauma sensitivity, and the limits of immersive technology in sensitive social contexts.

My Role and Contributions

I contributed to the research, design, and implementation of the VR experience. My work included reviewing literature on harassment awareness, behavior change, VR immersiveness, and technology for social training; designing the scenario structure; implementing the VR environment in Unity; and contributing to user testing and interpretation of findings.

The project strengthened my ability to use immersive technologies for sensitive human-centered problems, where technical implementation must be balanced with ethics, accessibility, safety, and emotional impact.

Problem Context

Harassment awareness and response training are important in educational institutions, but conventional approaches such as lectures, policy documents, or static guidelines may not always help users recognize ambiguous situations or practice response thinking. Immersive scenarios can provide more contextualized learning, but they must be designed carefully due to the sensitivity of the topic.

The project addressed this challenge by using VR not for shock value, but for structured awareness: helping participants identify harassment, understand social dynamics, and reflect on action in a controlled and safer environment.

Design Rationale

A key design decision was to use a third-person perspective rather than placing participants directly into a first-person victim role. This was important because first-person immersion in sensitive scenarios can be emotionally intense and may trigger past experiences for some users.

The third-person design allowed participants to observe the scenario, identify problematic behavior, and reflect on possible responses without being forced into a highly personal or potentially distressing perspective.

VR Scenario Screens

The images below show early VR scenario environments and interaction contexts developed for the awareness training experience.

User Testing and Findings

User testing was conducted with a balanced female-to-male participant ratio. The results were positive and suggested that the VR experience helped participants identify harassment scenarios and encouraged stronger willingness to take action against harassment.

The project also revealed an important design tradeoff: while VR can be powerful for embodied training and awareness, simpler 2D or guideline-based solutions may be more appropriate for basic information delivery. This led to the idea of comparing 2D and 3D approaches in future work.

Future Direction

The second iteration of the project aimed to expand the range of scenarios and compare VR-based training with a 2D solution. The motivation was to understand which medium is more effective for different goals: awareness, learning, response confidence, and behavioral intention.

The longer-term goal was to develop a solution that could be deployed in an institutional context to help future students better understand harassment and available response pathways.