Two Immigrant Entrepreneurs Create Virtual Reunions Zaidee Stavely - PRI’s The World
go to original June 26, 2017

Family Reunions Project Introduction (Sumak Productions)

It’s a typical country wedding in Mexico, this one taking place in the town of Poza Redonda, in the state of San Luis Potosí. The bride and groom exchange vows and then things get rowdy with a traditional dance, clapping and flashing lights.



But one person attending the wedding — the bride’s older brother — is thousands of miles away, in his living room in Virginia watching the festivities through virtual reality goggles. He couldn’t make the wedding in person, but the video and 3-D goggles immerse him, letting him look up or down and see and hear everything around him as it was recorded.

But as soon as he takes the goggles off, he’s back in the US.

The video is part of a virtual reality experiment called the Family Reunions Project.

“A lot of people talk about how VR [virtual reality] is cool because it transports you somewhere, or you feel like you’re somewhere else,” says Alvaro Morales, one of the creators of the Family Reunions Project. “But we feel like it’s not being applied toward the communities that could benefit from that transportation the most.”

The project’s creators were in San Francisco recently, showing their project at a conference for immigrant entrepreneurs. Morales says he got the idea for the project when he met the bride’s brother, from the Mexico wedding, in Virginia. He told Morales he couldn’t go to his little sister’s wedding because he was undocumented. If he went to Mexico, he wouldn’t be able to return to the US.

Morales says this is why he’s working with virtual reality — to take people back home, in a way, to places that feel cut off or maybe just too expensive to visit. It might be immigrants in the US who can't go home, or people abroad who can't travel to America.



“They can return to places that they’re effectively barred from returning to, specific spaces, like your home countries, your neighborhood, your school that you went to, the home that you grew up in, and get messages from the people you may be kind of disconnected from, at least in the physical world,” says Morales.

Morales was so excited about the idea, he quit his job as an analyst to work on it with Frisly Soberanis, a video producer. They’re both immigrants, too, who came to the US as kids. Morales is from Peru. Soberanis is from Guatemala.



“This is what this medium is basically made for,” says Soberanis. “Our community is a perfect example of how we could use this medium to bridge gaps and cross borders essentially.”

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