Newest Virtual Reality Experience From peta2 Promises Close Encounters at Princeton

For Immediate Release:
April 11, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

To encourage empathy for animals suffering in university laboratories, peta2—part of PETA’s youth division—is visiting Princeton today and tomorrow 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 seemingly find themselves stranded in the desert with a couple of fellow humans, abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a shocking experience, similar to what animals endure in laboratories. They’ll watch as their friends are subjected to painful tests—knowing that they’ll be next.

When: Thursday, April 11, and Friday, April 12, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

Where: Outside The Ivy Club Princeton, 43 Prospect Ave., Princeton

Watch the trailer here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request.

At Princeton, experimenters have injected mice with human stem cells to create “humanized mice.” They infected them with hepatitis B and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)—a double infection that caused severe liver damage—despite the known failure of the method to model human diseases. After several weeks, experimenters killed the mice by inserting a needle into their hearts and then cut out their organs. Other experimenters have cut into the heads of monkeys, carved out a portion of their skulls, implanted a recording chamber, inserted electrodes into their brains, and forced the monkeys (who were deliberately kept thirsty) to respond to images on a screen in exchange for a sip of juice. One monkey in a Princeton laboratory died after experimenters left a screw inside his head for eight months following a surgery.

“Many students don’t know that on their own college campuses, frightened and confused animals are being psychologically tormented, mutilated, and killed in laboratories, with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says peta2 Senior Director 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.

Abduction—which was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the immersive content creation studio Prosper XR—has stopped at nearly 50 other college campuses over the past year, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California–Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin. Abduction won Gold and Audience honors at the 2023 Shorty Impact Awards.

peta2—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—helps young people make meaningful changes for animals in their everyday lives. For more information, please visit peta2.org or follow the group on TikTok or Instagram.