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Test Your Work Ethic In This Unique VR Experiment

When put in charge of a bustling burger restaurant, will you cut corners to save cash or play by the rules?

Due to the immersive, intimate nature of VR technology, the growing medium has become a perfect tool for soliciting genuine reactions from its users. Standard video games are one thing, but when you’re actually standing in the shoes of your digital avatar, most tend to respond a little more like how they would in reality.

That’s the concept behind The Corrupt Kitchen VR Experience, an experimental project that puts users in a position of power and provides them with several unethical shortcuts for increasing profits for their virtual business.

As top chef at your towns hottest burger joint, Paradise Cafe, it’s up to you to satisfy the endless line of hungry patrons lining up outside your door. Throughout this experiment into the human mind, you can choose to play by the rules of an upstanding restaurant, or risk it for the biscuit and cut a few corners in order to please more customers.

This includes everything from ignoring the increasingly disgusting floor, skipping basic sanitation procedures such as washing your hands, even bribing the health inspector for a better rating! Of course every decision you make has consequences, so bribe responsibly.

Developed in collaboration with academics in the Schools of Politics, Law and Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, as well as the school’s Digital Research Team, The Corrupt Kitchen VR Experience is intended to open up a dialogue regarding business corruption, food hygiene, as well as training in a competitive environment.

At the end of each players session, the experience actually provides a look into how the decisions they made would play out in reality. Multiple modifications open up a layer of customization for businesses who may see the value in this platform as a training tool. The experience can be adjusted to provide specific options to the players and even run alongside custom training videos at certain segments throughout.

“We settled on the Corrupt Kitchen as something where we could ask the public to play a food preparation game with lots of opportunities for them to ignore various bits of legislation, spoke Dr. Martin Flintham, a contributor on the project. “The legal side of how they should act and what they do about it – how much do they own up to it or try to get away with it?”

The Corrupt Kitchen Experiment is an ongoing project still in the development phase. For more information check out the team’s developer blog here.

Image Credit: University of Nottingham

About the Scout

Former Writer (Kyle Melnick)

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