Virtual Reality Films: Bridging the Empathy Gap

“By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude […] From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

— Aldous Huxley

Is humanity consigned to remain “the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams” as pitied by the telepathic alien beings in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game? Perhaps not. The emerging medium of virtual reality (VR) film, which enables us to literally see (and hear, and sometimes receive haptic feedback) from another person’s perspective, will allow us to comprehensively share our inner worlds, and by doing so, will usher in a new age of empathy and understanding.

How frightening is it to be a woman walking home alone at night; how overwhelming is the sensory overload experienced by a person with autism; what was travelling while black in 1950s America like? VR films can let us experience all this and more with visceral vividness.

How are VR films, the low-tech ones requiring only a swivel chair, a headset and headphones, able to create such an immersive and convincing experience? The answer lies in an age-old philosophical question: are we the embodied mind, or the minded body? The mind-body link is inarguable; mental turmoil and pleasure manifest physically, and everything inflicted or lavished on the body is mulled over in the mind. However, the exact nature of this arrangement was once under debate. Cognitive science has furnished us with the answer, one that is easily confirmed using only a rubber-hand, knife and feather.

Stroke someone’s hand (hidden from view) and a rubber hand in front of them (have them focus their gaze intently on it) in synchrony. After a time (the more hypnotisable they are the less you’ll have to wait) they’ll feel as though that rubber hand is a part of their body. At this point you break out a knife and/or mallet. Their subsequent yelp will leave you in no doubt of the depth of illusion achieved. It is clear then, we are “the minded body”. How fortunate we are: to be tethered but not chained to our corporeal forms!

It is this same cognitive quirk, of our perceptions defining our realities in defiance of objective reality, that enables our mind to fill in the gaps to be willingly fooled and seduced by virtual reality. Thus, I wonder: if we are capable of an affinity with a joke-shop appendage, then can we not exploit this further to also feel an affinity, and profound empathy, with our fellow man or woman? Are VR films not the most powerful means available to us to bridge the empathy gap? If we see and hear it in a VR film, will we feel it in our flesh? Will the truth of another person’s perspective feel incontrovertible, inarguable… real?

There are reasons why I feel that VR films can go much further in bridging the empathy gap than traditional media. After all, both watching a movie and reading a book are exercises in empathy. However, when we watch a film on screen, we only do so as a voyeur. Films allow us the luxury of passivity; VR films demand that we react to an onslaught of sound and imagery in order to navigate a 360-degree space, if only by turning our heads or rotating in the swivel chair.

VR films require us to be active participants, the subjects of the film as much as its observers. In the VR space self-identity dissolves away, ‘death of the ego’ gives way to an ‘otherness’. In VR films where we are not the protagonist, the lines between us and the VR characters blur: we meld with them, we become them. We experience what they experience, we feel what they feel. We are inseparable.

Literature, too, asks us to sympathise with the plight of its characters, to understand and feel for them, be they monsters or martyrs. The author contrives to do so by offering up their histories and inner-most thoughts. If they are successful, the reader feels empathy for another through an ego dissolution not dissimilar to that achieved in VR.

But here’s the rub: although we might feel a modicum of the characters’ pain, it is always filtered through our own limited experiences, repurposed to breathe life into ink on a page. Fitting, as the very act of reading is an exercise in harnessing disparate parts of the brain, of bending a more primitive neural circuitry intended for less esoteric endeavours, to the purpose.

In contrast to VR films, there’s nothing that we generate, no imagery, no emotion, when reading a book that is outside of ourselves. The author provides direction, to be sure, but ultimately, we furnish every grain of that fictional world ourselves. We picture the halls of Hogwarts as the corridors of our alma mater; we dip into our quotidian regrets to comprehend how King Lear felt to discover he had called off the execution of his beloved Cordelia moments too late (‘This feather stirs; she lives!’).

Lastly, I’ll make the cynical point that a 20-minute VR film requires less cognitive (if not emotional) effort, and requires far less time than a book, and is therefore more accessible.

VR films, then, are the best of both worlds: a blending of the internal and interactive (how do I react?), the external and the passive (what do I react to?). Experiencing a VR film is still a constructive process (as all of memory and perception is), it is still unique, but the input is entirely external: we are starkly confronted with the reality of the VR filmmaker’s choosing. We put on our headsets and headphones, a profusion of wires as we plug in, and, to quote the Matrix: the mind makes it real.

That is not to say that you will be able to communicate the same perspective to every participant of a VR film. You can try to influence your audience into behaving in a desired way: binaural cuing (playing sound at a lag in one ear to prompt auditory triangulation), or even a VR character pointing the way. However, you cannot control the participants’ actions: where in the 360-degree space they look, if choose to look at all.

A couple of years ago I attended a VR panel which discussed a VR film in which there is a shooting. Depending on where the participant was facing at that precise moment, they emerged from the film thinking, variously, that they had witnessed a killing, that they had been killed, or even that they themselves were the killer.

Research shows that the degree to which participants choose to empathise and immerse themselves in a VR film are both under volitional control and influenced by personality traits. That is the saving grace of VR films, that they cannot be reduced to the didactic.

Why the VR films of today disappoint

With this great capacity for immersive storytelling and social commentary, I am disappointed, in a way, with the VR films I’ve experienced so far. The perspective-sharing aspect of VR is greatly under-utilised. In ‘4-feet: Blind Date’ a young woman in a wheelchair makes her first forays into dating, determined to lose her virginity. The entire draw for me was that I would be able to see the film from her eyes, presumably 4 feet off the ground. Instead, I was an interloper the entire time.

A voyeur in her bathroom, in her cramped, poster-plastered bedroom, a ghost sunk into the dining room table, swivelling this way and that to keep up with the argument between her, her sister and mother in rapid Italian. On a bus to meet her date, a middle-aged woman fusses over her, looks at her in consternation and demands to know, ‘Are you travelling by yourself?’

The busybody on the bus insinuates herself in the name of helping, insists on treating the main character as incapable in subtlety infuriating, well-meaning ways. I watched this unfold as a fellow passenger. The VR film would have had so much more power, and potential to change my worldview, if this was directed at me, if I had experienced and not just witnessed the scene.

In another VR film, ‘6x9: a virtual experience of solitary confinement’, I did experience the film as if I were an inmate, sitting on the bed of a prison cell. A former inmate recounted his experience of a sensory deprivation so profound that he started to hallucinate as if he were floating around the ceiling of his cell. That very moment I felt myself adrift, looking down at the cell as if from above. Inescapable, this was the perspective foisted onto me whichever way I turned my head.

One thing to be asked to imagine such a thing: a choice freely taken, quite another thing to be forced to experience it. It was the helplessness that I felt in this moment that let me truly empathise with the narrator. During the film, I’d turn around to find that scrawled graffiti had appeared on the wall behind me. I’d look around desperately, hoping that this time when I glanced at my little desk, I’d see tattered books from the library cart.

However, at other times, the filmmakers relegated the heavy lifting to traditional storytelling. Through narration piped through the headphones I learnt how it is possible to become so starved for human interaction that you act up every time the guard brings you your meal; desperate for acknowledgement, you ironically extend your time in solitary.

Another inmate spoke about the early days of solitary confinement where he would dream of amusement parks and roller coasters, of flying like Superman… until one day all of that stopped, from that moment on, all of his dreams took place, as did all hours of his waking life, exclusively within the confines of his prison cell.

Horrifying — it underscores my earlier point: we are our sensory input. When a VR film achieves making one experience and not just imagine such a unique and peculiar suffering — that is when the power of VR films will at last be realised.

For now, the medium is in its salad days: the experimental stage where filmmakers are experiencing a love affair with the technology itself. Reminiscent of the halcyon days of the silver screen where recording both the banal (a man sneezing) and the thrilling (the illusion of a steam train barrelling into the cinema audience) proved endlessly fascinating.

The superiority of VR to reality

This is a medium with a remarkable capacity for emulating the real world without needing to obey any of its physical laws or limitations. Mirrors which reflect nothing but the space behind you; an entire universe confined to a 6x9 cell, or the very opposite: an infinite space, a receding gateway of pillars as far as the eye can see. And most powerfully of all, we need not be (only) ourselves in the VR space, we are free to ‘dream each other’s dreams’.

In the VR space, we are tabula rasa; we are something and someone else entirely. We look down into the space where our lap should be to instead see a floor, a dining table, an arbour of animated, flourishing flowers. Only in the VR space can we look into a mirror without seeing our face; stare into the eyes of another person without a flicker of recognition from them. It’s uncanny.

We sit in a swivel chair, but perceive ourselves in forward motion, the illusion of locomotion as we look out of the windows of a virtual bus. (All achieved with merely a headset and headphones and interactivity limited to swivelling our head or our chair — the world’s least elaborate magic trick. No haptic feedback is required; the mind conjures the appropriate vestibular inputs at will.) It is no wonder that VR filmmakers are enamoured with these facets of the medium, but none are so incredible, so revolutionary as the ability to literally see from someone else’s eyes.

Although research into the effects of virtual reality on empathy are nascent, they are promising. I have high hopes that through virtual reality films we might be freed from the stockades of identity — the constellation of physical traits such as sex, race, disability that define us — and our lived experiences, and so rescued from the lonesome islands of our unique and singular personal realities.

Through perspective-sharing, VR films will bridge the empathy gap and in doing so will change the world. All that remains is the thrilling, uncharted journey ahead to see exactly how this all unfolds.

References

Kilteni, K., Groten, R., & Slater, M. (2012). The sense of embodiment in virtual reality. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 21(4), 373–387.

Shin, D. (2018). Empathy and embodied experience in virtual environment: To what extent can virtual reality stimulate empathy and embodied experience?. Computers in Human Behavior, 78, 64–73.

Schutte, N. S., & Stilinović, E. J. (2017). Facilitating empathy through virtual reality. Motivation and emotion, 41(6), 708–712.