Experts warn anti-sexual harassment VR training offered by startups like Vantage Point and Sisu VR could trigger survivors and do little to change bad behavior
Pranshu Verma / Washington Post : Tweets: @cydharrell and @wolven Tweets: Cyd Harrell / @cydharrell : sometimes I wonder whether things wouldn't be a lot better if respect - rather than “empathy” - was the goal that had gained traction in people's minds (for design & beyond) https://twitter.com/... @wolven : So I've spent a large portion of this semester getting paid to teach undergrads about things like why simulation of disability and other marginalized lived experiences actually makes things worse and I am right now offering to teach the exact same thing to this company. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The warning lands on a long arc: as far back as [[a:877306|2016, reporting flagged that the VR industry was ill-prepared for abuse and harassment inside its own products]], and psychological research had already cast doubt on VR's 'empathy machine' claims by 2018, finding simulation of marginalized experiences could even cause harm.
What has changed is that the same immersive techniques are now being sold as workplace compliance — Vantage Point and Sisu VR pitch anti-sexual-harassment training to employers — while platforms like Meta still struggle with harassment in VR itself, caught between recording-based enforcement and user privacy.
First-order effects
- Vantage Point and Sisu VR face direct challenges to their core product claim: experts cited argue immersive reenactments can trigger survivors rather than build skills, putting their sales pitch to HR buyers under scrutiny.
- Employers buying VR compliance training now have documented expert skepticism to weigh against vendor claims, complicating procurement decisions built on immersion-as-effectiveness assumptions.
Second-order effects
- Vendors will be pushed toward evidence-based design — respect-focused framing over 'empathy' simulation, per Cyd Harrell's critique — or toward blending VR with non-immersive modules, reshaping what the product category looks like.
- The debate hands traditional e-learning and live HR training providers an opening to position themselves as the lower-risk alternative for harassment prevention mandates.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from Meta's own harassment struggles holds — safety tools colliding with privacy and platform constraints — immersive environments may need governance designed in from the start rather than retrofitted, extending the lesson from calls to treat founder harassment like any other workplace abuse into synthetic spaces.
- A broader norm may emerge against simulating marginalized lived experience for training at all, shifting the market toward scenario practice without identity simulation.
The trend: Immersive tech is moving from selling presence as empathy to being held accountable for whether it actually changes behavior — with survivor harm becoming the industry's credibility test.