AR & VR: the potential for Empathy
With the development of immersive reality technologies, looking through another person’s perspective is becoming much more than just a saying. Just get your hands on a $20 piece of cardboard or an $800 head mounted display, and you’ve transported yourself into another story.
This is becoming possible because of immersive reality technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality (with plenty of overlap and gray area in between the three). Virtual reality is incredibly immersive and places you into an entirely new environment from the one you were just in. Augmented reality allows an individual to perceive the same sensations and visual stimuli that they normally would, with certain enhancements that overlay those perceptions. It’s an additional layer of information or imagery that augments one’s reality by incorporating another story in addition to your own. Mixed reality combines informational overlays, physical props, and fabricated environments — think of a flight simulator.
Given the human ability to integrate sensory information and produce meaningful behavior, we adapt quickly in virtual reality and while using augmented reality. Physical immersion registers as mental immersion, so as long as we’re seeing the change in environment, our minds will believe it. This is incredibly powerful and goes to show that humans rely on a subjective view on the world that is informed by our senses (visual, auditory, tactile, and proprioceptive to name a few.)
So let’s use AR and VR for empathy-generation.
There is potential for AR and VR to promote mutual understanding between two individuals, because it would be possible to tap into another person’s perspective by understanding their perceptions at the certain point in time.
Understanding someone else’s perceptions means understanding their narratives. Told through mediums from oral folklore to Kindles, narratives have resonated exceptionally well with humans and are the primary platform for the pass-down of knowledge. However, today’s narratives are often thought of as confined to the space in which they are presented.The viewer can choose to relate to another individual’s narrative and form connections between its elements and their own life, but this requires effort. True empathy is not easy, and it is a concept that many individuals have trouble confronting because it necessitates work on their part to even begin the process of understanding, much less follow up with meaningful action.
AR and VR make it possible to construct a more direct bridge between one person’s experience and the viewer. In the future, let’s use these technologies to strengthen stories and promote empathy-driven thinking, rather than confine them to the limited functions that were only possible on a 2-D screen. Let’s choose to represent stories that have been forgotten and underrepresented, and educate people through these unique experiences in a way that will resonate with them and incite them to make an impact.
A quick note:
It’s easy to fall into the trap of designing augmented reality and virtual reality applications like 2-D interfaces, even though the gestures, emotional impact, and mental rigor required are vastly different between 2-D interfaces and immersive realities (and between immersive realities themselves). It’s easy to adopt the same prototyping processes and design-thinking methodologies that we’ve been using for years, because they have been so successful in designing digital products. But AR & VR has untapped potential that we need to harness by thinking about the new ways that people interact when given an experience instead of a series of buttons to push. Only by working with these new possibilities and limitations can we generate the most impactful, accurate, and comfortable portrayal of one’s story.
