SHE is an immersive VR experience designed to support awareness and dialogue around gender-based sexual violence and harassment. By placing participants inside familiar, everyday scenarios, the experience encourages reflection on perspective, impact, and accountability. Rather than instructing, it creates space for conversation, understanding, and lasting awareness.
Conversations around gender-based sexual violence and harassment are often addressed through presentations, policies, and mandatory training modules. While necessary, these formats can struggle to create genuine understanding or emotional resonance, particularly when the goal is not just awareness, but empathy and reflection.
Many of the behaviors that contribute to harm are not extreme or overt. They are familiar, normalized, and often dismissed as part of everyday life.
This presents a challenge for education and prevention efforts, especially within post-secondary institutions and workplaces where meaningful culture change requires more than information alone. The primary demographic we hoped to engage, particularly young men aged 18 to 24, are not always meaningfully reached through traditional delivery methods.
The question became how to create an experience that could move beyond explanation and invite people to truly consider perspective, impact, and accountability.
SHE was developed as an immersive, interactive VR experience designed to support awareness-building and facilitated dialogue around gender-based sexual violence and harassment.
Using cinematic 360-degree video with professional actors, the experience places participants directly in the perspective of a young woman as she navigates everyday scenarios where harassment occurs.
Rather than relying on extreme situations, the scenarios are intentionally familiar. These are moments many women immediately recognize, situations that are often minimized despite their lasting emotional and psychological impact.
Purposeful interaction, such as engaging with a phone or a volleyball, is used sparingly to deepen immersion and reinforce presence without turning the experience into a traditional game.
The experience utilizes hand tracking rather than controllers, removing technical barriers and allowing participants to engage more naturally and intuitively within the environment.
SHE was created in collaboration with the Polytechnic’s Wellness Centre. Their professional support team guided the development of the scenarios to ensure the content was responsible and trauma-informed.
Key design considerations included:
SHE was created to be experienced and then discussed; The goal was not to instruct or lecture, it was to open space for reflection and conversation.
Since its launch, SHE has consistently sparked meaningful and often unexpected dialogue, particularly when facilitated through campus wellness programs and community organizations.
Participants tend to focus less on the technology itself and more on how the experience made them feel and what it prompted them to reconsider.
Notably, the experience has resonated strongly with male participants, especially those aged 18 to 24, the primary target demographic.
Many report a shift in awareness and understanding that traditional training formats often struggle to achieve.
By allowing users to experience these moments from a first-person perspective, SHE supports deeper reflection on impact, responsibility, and everyday behavior.
SHE reinforced an important insight for our team.
Immersive technology can be a powerful tool for culture change when it is designed with care and intention.
When used thoughtfully, it creates space for understanding, accountability, and conversations that continue well beyond the headset.
