Meet the Millennial Who Is Taking Virtual Reality to the Front Lines of the Church
Disney-raised and Harvard educated, Benjamin Crockett, 28, dropped everything during the second year of his thesis at Harvard Divinity School to take a sabbatical in Rome.
His mission is to use the latest technology in virtual reality to document the Church and her advocacy.
“I want to resurrect that sense of heroic Christianity that the Church has always been involved in but that I think has largely been forgotten,” said Crockett.
What better way than virtual reality, he thought.
Thus far, Crockett has filmed a pilgrimage series through the 44 “Station Churches” of Rome and collaborated with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) to film refugee camps in Malawi and Lebanon, as well as other celebrations, events and interviews in Rome.
“Rather than simply telling the audience a story, I want to give them an experience,” Crockett said.
With his aspiration to link every story to an action, his most sought-out endeavor is to create the Church’s first virtual-reality news program called VR2 (pronounced “virtue”), an immersive media brand to inspire, inform and educate the new generation of Catholic youth that takes people to the heart of the Church’s mission.
One of Crockett’s main supporters, Dudley Rose, Harvard associate dean of ministry studies, hopes to see his project bear fruit in the way he imagined to bring immersive content to thousands of young people.
“We are also very interested in seeing him experiment, research and test hypotheses,” Rose added. “As his work resides in the technology field and makes use of social media and other electronic means for distribution, he has the ability to learn what demographics he is reaching.”
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