This actress is part of the Accenture Avenues VR training program for social workers rooting out child abuse.
This actress is part of the Accenture Avenues VR training program for social workers rooting out child abuse.
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Friends With Holograms: Using VR to train social workers to sniff out child abuse

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Social workers have to make important decisions every day when investigating child abuse. Trained social workers are the best at shouldering that responsibility, but they aren’t always available to train new workers. That’s where virtual reality could make a difference.

Accenture worked with a New York-based digital agency, Friends With Holograms, to create a VR training program dubbed Accenture Avenues (from Accenture Virtual Experience Solution). They created a VR training program that improves the teaching and immerses the trainee in a realistic environment. It also uses voice recognition as an input system to further increase realism.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.