Delivered through a traveling installation, Project Literacy: The Lives Unseen puts users in the shoes of a person who deals with low literacy on a daily basis. In each VR story, users find themselves inside a frozen moment, in a photorealistic, 360-degree virtual space. A haunting inner monologue offers a window into each character’s thoughts and feelings. The stories are based on interviews with real people, ensuring the experiences are true to life, and offer a layered understanding of this complex problem. Each piece is supplemented with contextual information, fostering a deeper understanding of these issues. These experiences can be seen through the GearVR headset with the installation, or viewed on YouTube 360.

Project Literacy is a global campaign, and after its success last year we’ve worked to bring new light to this campaign in an interactive way. Project Literacy: The Lives Unseen is a travelling installation that highlights three different issues impacted by illiteracy; gender, malnutrition and bloodshed. The experiences are photo-realistic “frozen moments” allowing users to experience a moment in the characters lives.

The installation itself consists of 5 large scale walls that assemble, allowing each user to be immersed in their own space for viewing. There are large masks that house VR headsets, hanging above the head of the users, and swivel seats to allow ease of movement while in the headset. The design and coordination of building the installation was on a coinciding deadline with the creation of the VR experiences, which was about a 4-5 month process, though ideation, concepting, design, and final production.

The Project Literacy campaign has had an international reach, and The Lives Unseen has been toured in Texas and San Francisco, making a larger outreach in person. The engagement level has been extremely positive and high, thousands of people viewing the videos online, and hundreds of CEOs, policymakers, journalists, etc viewing the live installation. The installation has in turn brought more attention to the global Project Literacy campaign, which has supported over 700K adults and children through literacy programs. The campaign itself has reached 2.2 billion people through its outreach, with the goal to end illiteracy by 2030.