Virtual reality is sometimes called the ‘final medium’ - meaning that it is, over and above any other that humankind has created, the ultimate way to share experiences and ideas. It is the logical conclusion of the trajectory from cave drawings, through to literature, television, gaming, to the internet. The possibilities, once we really get going with VR, are limitless.
Being the ultimate way to share experiences and ideas is also behind the notion of VR as an ‘empathy machine’. VR content can be more effective at generating empathy and, in theory, spurring us on to act.
Stories since the dawn of civilisation have sought to place us in one another’s shoes, to question our perspectives and points of view. The internet and video media have both done an excellent job of presenting us with the real problems our species is facing, and - in many cases - catalysed important action. But no matter how good these stories are, nothing can beat experiencing a perspective in the first person. Nothing is more real than the lived experience. And virtual reality has the power to make any experience feel viscerally real.
Presence is where your brain is convinced that what you’re experiencing is real, even though you know you’re in a simulation. This force of presence can be incredibly powerful, causing you to physically feel a sensation that is being communicated only through visual and audio input, for example. It’s possible for your stomach to lurch as you ride a virtual rollercoaster from your sofa, or to feel the jaws of a lioness around your arm whilst sitting in a pub in Shoreditch on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. Anyone who’s spent any time in VR will be able to tell you their ‘presence’ story. So, if presence can have such a psychosomatic impact on the body, what can it do for our minds?
There are plenty of artists and filmmakers who believe that the emotional impact of VR has the potential to alter our society for the better. Projects like the performance art piece, ‘The Machine To Be Another’ in which participants ‘swap perception’ with another person, are designed with this notion of the empathy machine at their heart. Likewise, the famous Project Syria VR film by Nonny de la Peña uses VR to communicate the reality of the plight of children in war-torn Syria, to much-lauded success.
However, not everybody is quite so convinced of the staying power of the emotions elicited under the influence of VR. How long, after all, do these emotions last once the headset is removed? Will seeing a VR film of starving children really be any more successful at drumming up donations than the heart-rending images we’ve been seeing on television for years?
“If you won't believe someone's pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don't actually care about their pain,” wrote games developer, Robert Yang, in his famous diatribe against the term ‘empathy machine’.
Eventually, it all boils down to intention. What is the purpose of the ‘empathy machine’? Is it just to remind the privileged of what suffering is? Do charities need to fork out to create experiences in virtual reality in order to make people feel enough to donate? Who is really benefitting from all this empathy?
There are nearly as many questions as there are answers, and, as it’s all a matter of perspective anyhow, there is no right or wrong. But if we move away from the delicate area of humanitarianism and VR, and return to the safe ground of entertainment, then empathy becomes a much less loaded term.
Any form of art should aim to elicit emotion. Shared emotion (i.e. empathy) is what storytelling is all about, and storytelling is a fundamental part of what it means to be human: we have done it through all our existence. Virtual reality is the ‘final medium’ because it allows us to create stories with a level of presence that writers and artists have been seeking for thousands of years. Everybody enjoys stories, and they enjoy them because they like to be transported, to have their perspectives questioned, to walk in the shoes of other characters. Humanitarianism and storytelling are not, of course, mutually exclusive, and neither is exempt from political bias in one way or another. It all comes down, finally, to how you tell the tale.
