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    Retha Hill

    Retha Hill

    Contributor

    Retha Hill is the founder of AncestoriesXR.com, a startup for family genealogists that creates an interactive, virtual reality way for people to go back in time to see the world that an ancestor would have experienced. The user can walk in their ancestor’s shoes, see the neighborhoods where they lived, and experience in virtual reality the events that were taking place at that time. She is a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University.

  • The Emancipation Oak where 'contraband' became free — in XR

    In 1619, the first Africans were marched off a warship and sold into slavery. Nearly 244 years later, under an oak tree not far from where those Africans trod, formerly enslaved people who had fled to the protection of the Union Army gathered to hear the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.