Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience was created by Elise Ogle, Tobin Asher and Professor Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017, was released free on Steam on 30 January 2018, and arrived free on Meta Quest headsets on 5 August 2025. The experience lasts about seven minutes.

You spend several days in the life of someone who can no longer afford their home. You interact with your surroundings, choosing what to sell to cover the rent and trying to protect yourself and your belongings as your resources shrink. The aim is to challenge a common thinking error psychologists call the fundamental attribution error: we tend to blame other people’s misfortunes on their character, while blaming our own on circumstances. By living through the circumstances, users see how quickly anyone could lose a home.