New PETA Virtual Reality Experience Abduction Available on Meta Quest

For Immediate Release:
June 1, 2023

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

PETA is pleased to announce that anyone with a Meta Quest virtual reality headset can now experience Abduction, PETA’s eerie alien encounter, available for free at the Meta Quest online store.

During this immersive, empathy-building experience, participants find themselves seemingly stranded in the desert with a couple of fellow humans, kidnapped by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a living nightmare similar to what animals endure in laboratories. They watch as others are used for experiments—inspired by real tests done on animals—knowing that they’ll be next.

“Frightened and confused animals are tormented, mutilated, and killed in cold, barren laboratories every day, with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says PETA Senior Director Rachelle Owen. “PETA is on a mission to open people’s eyes to this cruelty, help them understand what it feels like, and motivate them to join our call for a switch to superior, non-animal research.”

Studies show that 90% of all basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans, which is why PETA is pushing universities to pivot to sophisticated, human-relevant research methods.

Abduction—which was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the virtual reality creation studio Prosper XR—premiered during a nationwide college campus tour and has also appeared at South by Southwest.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.