e09: Virtual Reality, Immersion, & Empathy
February 16th, 2023
18:00-19:00 CET (Europe) • 1:00-2:00 EST (North America, Eastern)
We’ll be discussing “Exploring virtual reality for quality immersive empathy building experiences,” by Young and colleagues (2021). This paper explores the potential of virtual reality (VR) technology as a tool for facilitating perspective-taking - understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings. The researchers conducted an experiment to compare two types of VR experiences and measure how empathy and attitudes towards a protagonist/s change after the viewing. Further, participants identified the elements contributing to a high-quality VR experience. The findings of this research could inform future creative VR technology projects on how to build empathy and enhance perspective-taking.
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📄 Young, O’Dwyer, Smolic, 2021:
Exploring virtual reality for quality immersive empathy building experiences. Behaviour & Information Technology. 41(16):3415-3431.
DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2021.1993336
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Virtual reality (VR) technology presents users with virtual environments to experience various interactive, immersive, and imaginary experiences. While traditional perspective-taking exercises rely on the participant to imagine a self-other merging process to feel connected with other people (typically using second and third-person narrative perspectives), VR can allow an individual to embody an other through first-person narratives delivered via multimodal – visual, aural, haptic – technology-mediated experiences. This process enables users to perceptually and effectively portal into somebody else’s body, where they can potentially see, hear, and feel from the point of view of the protagonist and control choices on their behalf in real-time. This article explores the use of VR as an ‘empathy-making machine’ by facilitating perspective-taking and allowing users to experience another person’s circumstances. An experiment was performed to compare two different types of perspective-taking VR applications. Levels of empathy, oneness, and attitudes towards a protagonist or focus group within VR materials were captured. Participants then identified the elements of the VR content that contributed to a quality experience. These measures were used to discuss methodologies and techniques for creating quality empathy-building techniques. The findings of this research will be used to inform future creative technology projects presented in VR.