Virtual Reality in Humanistic Prisons Education. The STEPS project.

In recent years, since the second half of the 20th century, prison has tended to be seen as a place not of punishment, but of isolation from the society of the person who broke the law. The aim is correcting him; that is, preparing him for reintegration into society as a responsible person who will avoid recidivism. In this paper we present the progress we made in the Erasmus+ project STEPS. In STEPS we deal with the humanistic education of prisoners in four countries (Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Portugal). We set up an educational program around a number of Virtual Reality interactive movies based on dramatized real former prisoner's stories. In brief, prisoners go deep into other people's “misled” lives by entering 3D “rooms” in which the personal story of a former prisoner is unwrapped. We engage the latest VR technology and we explore the area of VR cinematics which, after the commercialization of VR, is of special interest since it is expected to become a new revolution in film making.