Chilling Virtual Reality Experience From peta2 Promises Close Encounters at UNC–Chapel Hill
For Immediate Release:
November 1, 2024
Contact:
Brandi Pharris 202-483-7382
To encourage empathy for animals suffering in university laboratories, peta2—part of PETA’s youth division—will visit the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill next week with Abduction, an award-winning virtual reality experience landing on college campuses across the country.
In this eerie experience, visitors will enter a mysterious truck containing a mobile virtual reality studio. The students will find themselves seemingly stranded with a couple of fellow humans in the desert, where they will be abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a shocking experience similar to that endured by animals in laboratories. They’ll watch as their friends are subjected to painful tests—knowing that they’ll be next.
When: Monday,November 4; Tuesday, November 5; and Thursday, November 7, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. each day
Where: West Lounge Table 2 inside the Frank Porter Graham Student Union, 209 South Rd., Chapel Hill
Watch the trailer here.
At the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, experimenters forced pregnant mice to consume alcohol in order to induce birth defects, even though the harmful effects of alcohol are widely known. They subjected other mice to “binge drinking” sessions, in which mice were kept in complete darkness with a bottle full of alcohol for hours on end. In another university laboratory, experimenters sewed stitches in rabbits’ corneas, leaving them in for weeks before surgically replacing the damaged portions of the eyes with tissue from “donor rabbits,” who were killed for the test. After a month, several of the transplants were rejected and experimenters killed the remaining rabbits and dissected their eyes. Other experiments included injecting a virus directly into the eyes of mice and damaging their corneas by placing a chemical-soaked paper on them.
“Many students don’t know that on their own college campuses, frightened and confused animals are psychologically tormented, mutilated, and killed in laboratories, with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says peta2 Vice President Rachelle Owen. “peta2 is on a mission to open young people’s eyes to this cruelty, help students 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 peta2 is pushing universities to pivot to sophisticated, human-relevant research methods.
Since its debut, Abduction has traveled from coast to coast, visiting more than 50 colleges and universities, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California–Los Angeles, and the University of Texas–Austin. Abduction was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the immersive content creation studio Prosper XR, won “Gold” and “Audience” honors in the 2023 Shorty Impact Awards, and was a nominee for the 2024 Webby Awards.
peta2—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers young people positive, empowering actions to help animals. For more information, please visit peta2.com or follow the group on TikTok or Instagram.
