Clorama Dorvilias, Founder and CEO, Debias VR
By Mel on January 30, 2020
Debias VR is a company that creates gamified immersive experiences to combat racial and gender biases. The company was launched after Clorama Dorvilias and Jessica Outlaw won a 2017 Oculus Launch Pad scholarship* for developing the immersive experience now known as Teacher’s Lens. Dorvilias’s personal experience of feeling treated unfairly in her graduate program and a deep discussion with Outlaw about implicit bias and how it creates unwelcome classroom environments led to the creation of Teacher’s Lens: a simulated classroom interaction with students to help teachers identify and reflect upon their biases and develop empathy to create more inclusive classrooms.
Dorvilias, who is from San Jose, California, completed her B.S. in Political Science at Santa Clara University, taught herself the Adobe Creative Suite and how to code, became a freelance designer, and earned her M.A. in Interaction Design Communication at the University of the Arts London. Her impressive work experience includes working at nonprofits such as Americorps and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, in government as a public official for the City of San Jose, and in virtual reality companies Pebble Code and Oculus VR, which have both been acquired by Facebook in recent years.
Dorvilias’s entrepreneurial nature, technology expertise, and dedication to solving social issues, along with the emergence of VR as a powerful, up-and-coming force in training and development, provides the perfect opportunity for her to lead Debias VR to become a leading company in diversity and inclusion development and training.
*It is important to note that even after receiving funding from Oculus, the project had difficulties raising capital from investors, as only 2.2% of investor funding in 2018 went to women-led startups, according to Forbes.
Gamifying Empathy to Foster Equality – Arm
Clorama is taking advantage of the empathy-generating possibilities of VR to develop a product that has continued to show relevance to this day. By leveraging on life experiences and personal perspectives Debias is a VR company that is exciting and inspiring. It combines research-based content with modern social trends and cutting-edge technology. These all marks of a great startup and entrepreneur.
I especially like that Clorama was in a program not too dissimilar to the MET (interaction design) and was asked to solve a social problem using technology for her thesis. She recognised the racial biases that led to her negative experience within the program, and used the opportunities presented to her to propose Debias VR. From the Arm website linked above, it sounds like she ended up dropping out to to pursue this business. I also deeply respect this vision of what she wants to create vs what she should do (finish her masters).