Shari Frilot started the New Frontier program at Sundance in 2007, and produced the festival’s first VR experience in 2012 with Nonny de la Peña’s Hunger in LA using an early Rift prototype made by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Frilot has since programmed around 75 VR experiences since 2014 that explore storytelling, empathy, and emotional presence, but she sees that it’s going beyond empathy. She says that being in VR gives us “the ability to see ourselves in a way that we could never do alone,” and that VR embodiment may allow us to overcome our unconscious biases. In speaking about embodying a number of different creatures in The Life of Us she says, “you can watch yourself tap these primitive instinctual responses and you watch yourself go into another place of being able to socially engage with somebody” beyond the normal labels of white dude or a black lesbian.