HIGH-TECH HIROSHIMA
I feel nothing as the huge girder swinging ominously in front of me smashes into my chest, knocking me off my precarious position atop a high-rise construction site. My body spins as I plummet towards the ground before the concrete greets me with an unforgiving jolt and my world turns a grim shade of red.
Mere seconds earlier, I had been edging along a steel beam, arms outstretched to keep my balance. Now, I am little more than a crumpled mass of regret at the base of a half-built tower, wondering aloud – as I remove the virtual reality headset – what I could have done to avoid my grisly fate.
“There’s no way to avoid it,” says Steven Boura, a designer at technology firm BeRise that developed the unwinnable scenario I had just predictably failed. “This is only to prepare your mind, and instil in you the notion that, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, bad things are going to happen.”
The scenario is one of many interactive safety instruction exercises developed by the company, which is based in Hiroshima on Japan’s Honshu Island. The idea is that a virtual reality experience is more
