How Nonprofits Are Using Virtual Reality to Tackle Real-World Issues

You meander around the supermarket loading a basket with goods—breakfast tea, sugar, milk. Along the way, though, you become befuddled. You struggle to recall the items on the shopping list. When you arrive at check out, you discover several items in the basket that you do not recall picking up. Then it comes time to pay the cashier, and you can’t seem to count out the proper sum.

This virtual reality experience, played out using an Android smartphone, is the work of medical research nonprofit Alzheimer’s Research UK. The organization’s primary mission is to raise money for research into dementia and other memory-related illness, but it also seeks to raise awareness and empathy for a disease that its leaders say the public still poorly understands.