Google's DEI team designed and delivered a VR training experience focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), built with Equal Reality - the VR studio whose DEI training line lives on today as the Equal Reality VR suite in PTR's VR Library. The work was documented in a peer-reviewed paper co-authored by three Google researchers and PTR co-founder Leonie Sanderson, credited for Equal Reality, presented at CHI EA '24, the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in May 2024.
Traditional DEI training can feel passive and disconnected from lived experience. Google's DEI team wanted an approach that could build empathy and self-awareness, and lead to practical action, rather than relying on lectures or checklists.
The team built four original VR scenarios, developed between 2021 and 2023 by 13 Google employee volunteers from Google's DEI programme working with Equal Reality, and informed by real incidents shared by Google employees. Each scenario lets a trainee experience the same difficult workplace situation from two different characters' points of view, for example a video call where a colleague's technical expertise is wrongly assumed based on appearance, seen first from the underestimated colleague's perspective and then from a bystander's. In each scenario, trainees can choose to "call it out," "call it in," or "ignore" the situation. The published paper notes that keeping the discussion out of the app, as a live, facilitated group debrief instead of a scripted in-app discussion, was a deliberate design choice.
Development included a QA phase of 7 testing sessions with 20 volunteer testers, who reported over 100 issues before the training was refined. The first training cohort ran in September 2023: 32 members of Google's security team senior staff were invited, 26 accepted, and 23 of them used Meta Quest 2 headsets while 3 used a desktop version.
Figures below are as reported in the published paper.
Of the 11 QA testers who completed the optional survey (10 of 11) said the scenarios felt real to them, and all but one found the VR format effective at creating an empathic response.
Average satisfaction among the 7 trainees who returned the post-training survey (4.7 out of 5).
Average agreement that the training was useful for understanding DEI issues, and separately that it was better than Google's standard DEI training (4.1 out of 5 each).
"Microaggressions felt more real."
"Made empathy more real via experience"
Another participant described experiencing a situation "from the perspective of a member of a historically underrepresented group." The authors are explicit that these are preliminary, self-reported findings from a single company and a small, optional-response sample, with no comparison or control group.
CHI EA '24 · ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Co-authored by three Google researchers and PTR co-founder Leonie Sanderson, credited for Equal Reality. Presented May 2024.
DOI 10.1145/3613905.3637128
Download the paper (PDF) ACM recordThe work was later covered by Forbes, which named Google among the organisations PTR has delivered VR-based DEI training to (13 June 2025).