Engendering sympathy via virtual reality
WASHINGTON : The fundraiser invitation promised a night of “Cocktails and Virtual Reality.” More than 40 people crowded into a Washington rowhouse, sipping mixed drinks in Mason jars before settling into folding chairs and adjusting the focus on their Oculus Rift goggles.
For eight minutes, they traversed through a squalid camp that sprawled out in every direction. The camp has become home to about 120,000 Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar who fled violence from Buddhist mobs four years ago.
Flora Lerenman, an elementary school teacher, said she had read articles about the plight of the Rohingya, but after watching the film she felt much closer to their struggle.
“I was right there,” she said. “We were standing beneath the same sky.”
Over the past two years, technology giants and Hollywood have poured millions of dollars into virtual reality in the hope that the medium will transform gaming and entertainment. But a growing crop of filmmakers, policymakers, researchers, human rights workers and even some law enforcement officials see a broader societal purpose in the emerging medium’s stunning ability to make people feel as if they have experienced an event first-hand.
These advocates cite research that shows virtual reality can push the boundaries of empathy and
We don’t actually know whether it’s this empathy machine or whether, if you have an immersive experience, you traumatise your users. There’s also a danger that when you have so many extreme experiences, that you become desensitised. — Stephen Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California
influence decision-making about issues as varied as policing and the environment. But they are also facing new questions about the unintended consequences of an early-stage technology that may be doing harm to users by putting them in situations that seem all too real.
This summer, a 15-person film crew flew to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek to simulate the horrors of the Holocaust in virtual reality as part of an effort to preserve the memory of the atrocity for future generations. They filmed a scene in which viewers who don a VR headset can enter a gas chamber, escorted by a three-dimensional hologram of a living survivor.
“We don’t actually know whether it’s this empathy machine or whether, if you have an immersive experience, you traumatise your users,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, which is creating the Holocaust simulations in partnership with virtual-reality startups. “There’s also a danger that when you have so many extreme experiences, that you become desensitised.”
Using simulations and roleplaying to foster understanding is hardly a new idea. But new research shows that full virtualreality immersion - in which a person wearing a headset can be transported instantly to a gunfight on a New York street corner, witness the gruesome crossfire of the Syrian civil war or experience what it is like to suffer from dementia - places a unique stamp on the brain that is distinct from watching a movie or reading a book.
“We’re showing that parts of the brain that light up (when a person has a real-life experience) also light up when one has the same experience in virtual reality,” said Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “That allows for this process of perspective-taking, which is kind of hard to do for most people.”
At the past two Sundance Film Festivals, attendees who put on virtual-reality headsets could sit in a living room while a husband and wife engaged in a bloody domestic quarrel, or walk into the middle of a police-involved shooting - watching the same scene play out from the different perspectives of a local shopkeeper, two police officers and the young black men they stop for shoplifting.
Separately, the United Nations has produced films about humanitarian crises around the globe, including 360-degree renderings of post-Ebola Liberia, earthquake relief in Nepal and a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, as experienced by a 12-year-old girl who lives there.
Even some police officials are starting to experiment with VR in hopes of training officers to handle stressful encounters without resorting to force.
The Police Foundation, a nonprofit research group staffed by former law enforcement officials, is applying for grants to study the use of virtual reality in police training, said the organisation’s president, Jim Bueermann. This year, Bueermann met with senior government officials to describe his vision - to put a VR headset in every police department in the country.
“We want to get middle-aged white guys to trade places with a 20-year-old African-American male walking down the street who gets stopped by police for what he perceives to be no reason,” Bueermann said. “I’ve been through enough of this personally to believe that this has huge potential for changing the way we think about the training of police officers and their evaluation.” — Washington Post