It is one thing to say that you understand someone's pain and worries, but quite another to experience them. From living in a refugee tent to facing the Ebola epidemic, the United Nations is using virtual reality to create awareness of humanitarian crises around the world in hopes of changing how a person acts towards others.

“Virtual reality is the ability to really take part in a story that usually you're only a passive spectator on. And it's giving you the possibility to walk in another person's shoes,” said Gabo Arora, Creative Director and Special Adviser to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Action Campaign.

The campaign is a special initiative of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to empower and inspire people to support their Governments to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 SDGs that aim to alleviate poverty, provide universal education and help the environment.

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The promise and hype surrounding virtual reality is spilling into the criminal justice system.

Researchers from Staffordshire University in England announced Tuesday that they’ve been awarded a $200,000 European Commission grant to develop ways of presenting crime-scene evidence to jurors and lawyers through virtual reality.

Caroline Sturdy Colls, a Staffordshire professor of forensic archaeology and genocide investigation, is leading the project.

“A number of novel, digital non-invasive methods,” she said in a statement, have the “potential to…permit access to difficult and/or dangerous environments, create a more accurate record of buried or concealed evidence and provide more effective means of presenting evidence in court.”

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