How VR is Helping the Poor with Charity
“This is just the start” — Mark Zuckerberg
The alluring possibilities of virtual reality are endless.
We talked a lot about how VR can be used for innovative ways like helping prisoners and teaching students calculus & chemistry.
Despite all of these uses that make our lives a bit easier, today we have an extraordinary project to cover. One that may redefine what you may or may not have though Virtual Reality could be used for, something that’s going to fundamentally revolutionize the way we think and give to others in this world.
Virtual Reality will redefine how we give to charity. Giving is human nature. It can be found in the chemicals in our brains and can be traced back thousands of years and holds an importance in all of our lives. Giving organizations the money they need to have an impact is essential. Impact & Change are the only measures of success for charitable organizations.
Virtual Reality is the Ultimate Empathy Machine:
Chris Milk gave a Ted talk last year about VR being the ultimate empathy machine that can translate to amazing films and experiences accurately. Chris Milk uses cutting edge technology to produce astonishing films that delight and enchant. Milk says the human story is the driving force behind everything he does and VR is a key to his end goal. Check out his ted talk here:
Unicef invited the public to see inside a Syrian refugee camp in New Zealand. They found that virtual reality increased people’s chances of donating their money after seeing who they were actually affecting.
The Game Changer:
Many charity organizations have implemented some medium of VR as a tool to represent their cause, to connect with others in VR to trigger empathy which is tied to giving.
However, one organization Virtual Village is paving the way for how charity giving should be done.
Virtual Village is the new way of donating to charity in a fully immersive environment where you can see exactly where your money goes, to who it goes and to what exactly it goes to.
How to Experience Virtual Village:
with your finger over your smartphone screen to discover different angles
your smartphone like a camera to explore the environment around you
Place your smartphone in your VR headset, put it on and look around
How Virtual Village is Revolutionizing the Charity Sector:
It’s not just about making a charitable experience in virtual reality. It’s about:
Impact: Experience the change your donations have on beneficiaries as the environment changes.
Transparency: Find out how much money is really needed to accomplish different projects on an item basis.
Choice: Choose between different charities and projects you want to donate to in the matching environment
Learn: Interact with villagers to hear their stories and interesting facts about Africa
Benefits for Charity Organizations
Additional Target Group: Engage with young donors who are otherwise hard to reach.
Less Administration: Receive donations already allocated to the represented projects
Priorities: Choose which projects you want to represent in the matching environment and set priorities by weighing your projects differently
Raise Awareness: promote your projects in the matching environment, and grow your one-off donors to regular donors
We interviewed the CEO and Founder Vera Grablechner to get some additional information about this upcoming project.
1. When is Virtual Village VR coming out?
“We are planning to launch our first environment (an African village) in 2017 Q3. However, this depends on when our investment round is completed.”
2. What are Virtual Village VR’s Goals for short & long term?
“At Virtual Village we believe that donations should be transparent, sustainable and rewarding. Therefore, we offer our users many different options how to improve the life of beneficiaries and empower donors to make an active decision about where their donated money goes.
Moreover, we let them experience the impact of their aid and make donating a fun social activity they can share with their friends to realize projects together or compete against each other.
Furthermore, we believe that charities can achieve better results with combined forces and small charities should have the same chances to receive donations as bigger ones. Hence, we represent charities of different sizes on the same level beside each other which allows them to gain equal awareness and let our users decide which ones they want to support first.
In terms of beneficiaries, we want to support disadvantaged people by providing them with necessary products and services in various areas such as education, medicine, sanitation, agriculture, etc. By training local people in those and other areas we aim at developing a sustainable economy and enable people to help themselves in the long-term.”
3. Plans for the future
“Once our first environment is successfully launched, we are planning to work on additional environments such as slums in India and many more. We want to build an entire virtual world of charity environments allowing people to help beneficiaries all over the world. Of course, we are also looking into launching Virtual Village in different countries meaning different languages. We have a lot of other features planned to keep Virtual Village engaging but that is to be found out by our users …”
Conclusion
Innovative Virtual Reality companies like Virtual Village are using the commonality of smartphones in VR Headsets to incentivize more people to give away their funds to charitable organizations.
We’ve seen a tremendous amount of disruptive change coming from the Virtual Reality Industry. It is surely certain that this kind of content will accelerate based on trends in the future.
You most likely have some other VR ideas that can change the world! Share them with us on social media!
Originally published at www.vudream.com.
