VR and Empathy

 After watching Chris Milk’s TED talk, “VR is the ultimate empathy machine,” I totally understand what he means. Typically, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about who uses VR and the purpose of VR is kids and entertainment. I picture teenage boys in first person shooter simulations or driving race cars with a connected wheel controller. But the way Milk describes VR, it can be used for positive social change. He emphasizes that VR can be used to quite literally put a person in someone else’s shoes. For example, his project, “Clouds over Sidra,” follows a little girl in a refugee camp in Syria. He felt that it was important that the medium was VR, rather than a documentary to be displayed on a tv, because it allowed viewers to be fully immersed in the experience: “When you look down, youre sitting on the same ground that she’s sitting on. And because of that, you feel her humanity in a different way. You empathize with her in a deeper way” (Milk 7:50) I think the physical tool, the Oculus headset, contributes to the immersion even more, although Rettburg says that VR was being created “for CAVE environments since the early 2000s” (196). In the TED talk video, a picture was included of the politicians in their suits wearing VR headsets, watching “Clouds over Sidra” and being astonished by what they were seeing. I think seeing the impact of the film that Milk and his colleagues made was what stuck with me the most.  

 

I first tried to check out Screen from Rettburg’s text, but the file that it downloaded wasn’t compatible with my computer. Then I went to look at Hearts and Minds: The Interrogation Project because the goal of the project is similar to Clouds over Sidra. I wasn’t able to view it, which I imagine is difficult to put on the internet anyway because of its nature as an immersive VR project, but it’s about American soldiers that were asked to interrogate and torture prisoners during the Iraq war. Like Clouds over Sidra, it helps people who never experienced those situations to gain a better understanding of what they went through. Viewers can choose one door out of four to enter. The spaces resemble American domestic environments and interacting with the space will cause the walls to fall away and put the viewer in a desert environment where a soldier tells them a story of torture or its effects. However, Hearts and Minds is intended for collective viewing where many viewers (up to 20) are in a room together whereas Clouds over Sidra is more of a personal experience in the headset where viewers are in the house with the girl and observing secluded moments.