Chickens, formerly of greener pastures, squawk and squabble as the cage moves towards the metallic abyss. They throw frantic glances at their plucked, bagged and bound friends as they tumble off the conveyor belt opposite them on to the factory floor.

I, Chicken, the new virtual reality experience from the late co-founder of The Simpsons, Sam Simon, is clamorously making its way across Sydney.

From the University of NSW in Kensington to Manly, children and university students are getting claustrophobic - journeying with their two-legged comrades from fields of green to the chopping block without ever leaving their campus.

At Macquarie University in Sydney's north-west, business student Sam Henson lifts one foot at a time to get his balance, then stretches his wings (otherwise known as elbows in the real world) and begins his flightless journey in Google's cardboard virtual reality glasses.

It starts pleasantly enough. As blue streams roll through fields of green, Mr Henson, 21, plucks around, getting a taste for the free-range lifestyle. It doesn't last long, within 30 seconds he is nabbed by the hand of a farmer - the same one that will later snap his neck on the abattoir floor.

"The technology is really amazing," said Mr Henson. "It shows the life of a chicken and then just how brutally they can be sent to the slaughter."

He sees the experience in a way only a business student could.

"It makes you question your own perspective on meat, but I guess you loose all morality chasing efficiency."

Ninety per cent of Australians eat chicken at least once a week, according to a report from the Australian Chicken Meat Federation. The industry is worth $2.4 billion a year in NSW alone.

The virtual reality experience was designed by Sam Simon and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to inject empathy into the cogs of the farm-to-plate machine, according to Mr Simon, who died from colon cancer before his experiment could make it to Australia.

"The biggest problem for animal lovers is that people don't have empathy for animals," he said last year.

Many people might still struggle to get over the empathy barrier with a broiler chicken but supermarkets have started taking notice of battery hens.

After years of sustained campaigns by animal activists, Coles and Woolworths have begun phasing out the sale of caged eggs by 2017.

Eggs may be changing but Mr Simon's project wants to shift attitudes toward the broiler chicken industry.

Some 400 million broiler chickens are killed on factory farms each year in Australia. Next year each Australian is expected to consume 47 kilograms of chicken, three kilograms more than in 2011, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The industry maintains that efficiency does not have to come at the cost of morality.

"Chicken meat growers take the welfare of their birds seriously. Out of respect for the birds themselves and in recognition of community attitudes to the humane treatment of livestock farmed specifically for their consumption," said a submission from the Chicken Meat industry to the Federal Government's agricultural white paper last year.