Using virtual experiences to facilitate refugees' integration in third countries

Virtual Experiences (VEs) have significant potential for a wide range of applications, including the potential to enrich the level of emotional interactions and socialisation, facilitate communication, treat phobias and PTSD, eliminate biases, deepen our understanding of ourselves and others, and enhance our appreciation of our environment. They also have the immense ability to elicit knowledge transfer and to change attitudes and behaviour. This research investigates whether VEs can play a key role in assisting refugees to learn how to navigate the complexities of the UK health system, a substantial stumbling block for their integration into society and for their own health and well-being. First, a pilot study involving University of Warwick students was conducted. During this study, the participants (N = 37) were exposed to material presented via three different media. The three media were descriptive text, a 360_video and a Virtual Environment (VE). All three media used in the experiment depicted a surgery in London. The experiment investigated whether any of the three media was superior in achieving knowledge transfer and whether there were specific attributes of the medium that could facilitate knowledge transfer. The results showed important tendencies and correlations between knowledge transfer and interactiveness of the media, with VE significantly superior across the four tested attributes. Furthermore, the results for the 360_video, demonstrated that the quality of the image was an important factor in achieving participants' appreciation of knowledge transfer. A second experiment build on these initial results. The participants (N=122) in this experiment were refugees in Senegal awaiting, what the UN Refugee Agency calls, "durable solutions" (repatriation to their country of origin, resettlement to third countries, or local integration in the country of asylum). They were exposed to material presented via three different media. These included a descriptive text, 360_images (superior to the previous 360_video) and a VE using a multi-factor approach where two of the three different media (360 and VE) were further sub-divided into six different factors. In both studies, we tested the hypothesis that interactive experiences have a greater propensity to elicit knowledge transfer because Using Virtual Experiences to Facilitate Refugees' Integration in Third Countries of their psychological and physiological effect on areas of the brain, which are crucial for recollection-based memories, memory for spatial and episodic context, and scene perception. An assessment of participants appreciation of the information provided was done at the end of both experiments. The results show that interactive media, VE, was significantly better across all tested attributes. This suggests that VEs do indeed provide a far better understanding of a complex problem, such as navigating the UK health system. UNHCR is already looking at innovative ways to help refugees in their quest for durable solutions and future work will look to deploy such VEs at a number of UNHCR offices.