VR and Civic Tech for the community

Inspired by the work of Chris Milk to use VR and 360 Filmmaking to deliver experiences of vulnerable populations on an international scale to UN leaders. Clorama will share her thoughts on how civic tech can similarly draw from this example to utilize the immersive value of VR to close empathy gaps in local government. She will go over several example use cases and demonstrate how she has used the 360 filmmaking to better inform her work and communication with stakeholders when designing user journeys of government services. She will also highlight some case studies of VR as a simulation tool for decision-makers in public policy.

Presenter:

Clorama Dorvilias

“Clorama grew up in San Jose and graduated with a BS in Political Science (2009).  She spent her early career in community engagement roles in the Public Sector and realized that technology was greatly underutilized to serve the public. Wanting to make a stronger impact, she self-taught to become a freelance front-end developer and volunteered her free time to create profitable digital presence for various non-profits and NGO’s.  In 2015, Clorama completed her Masters Degree in Interaction Design Communication at University of the Arts in London. For her thesis, she researched VR and its impact on social behavior. She created her first VR app to gamify anti-bias training in the workplace. She then took on various roles in UX in the public and private sector in London, France and the Bay Area while simultaneously working on freelance projects as VR Developer. Clients included: University of College of London, the London Neuropsychology Clinic  and Hyphen-Labs, LLC.
In 2017, she completed a successful fellowship as the lead UX Research and Design as a Code for America fellow where she delivered a open-source website for jobseekers in Municipality of Anchorage, Alaska. And became an Oculus Launch Pad scholarship winner for her submission of an anti-bias training app for classroom education. In partnership with Facebook/Oculus, Clorama is launching a startup in 2018 as the Co-Founder/CEO of Debias VR with goals to provide more effective and engaging alternative to traditional methods of corporate diversity training, leveraging the powerful medium of Virtual Reality.”