Assistant Instructional Professor, Juliano Saccomani has been awarded a 2022-23 Provost's Global Faculty Award for his work, “Virtual Reality: a critical immersive perspective from Rio de Janeiro”.
For the Provost's Global Faculty Award, Dr. Juliano Saccomani (Spanish and Portuguese UChicago) will start a partnership with the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro collaborating with local professor Dr. Ari Fonseca Filho (Tourism and Education). Together, they will create critically-relevant virtual reality materials that more accurately represent the social and cultural contexts of Brazilian society. The graduate research group "Audiovisual Tourism and Education" at Universidade Federal Fluminense will create the virtual reality materials, and the students in the Portuguese program at the University of Chicago will have the experience of immersing themselves in the culture and society depicted in those videos. Drs. Saccomani and Fonseca Filho will work together leading workshops discussing practical aspects of using virtual reality for educational purposes associated with tourism and society. The "Virtual Reality Initiative in Spanish and Portuguese" at the University of Chicago is led by Dr. Saccomani and Dr. Quevedo-Webb under the mentorship of Ana Lima and Nené Lozada. The project is funded by the College Curricular Innovation Fund, with research aid from the ETG grant.