Virtual Reality Films: Bridging the Empathy Gap
If we cannot feel it in the flesh, is it enough to see it with our own eyes?
“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 remaining “the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams” as pitied by the telepathic alien beings in Ender’s Game? Perhaps not. The emerging medium of virtual reality (VR) film, which enables us to literally see 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 while it’s hidden from view and a rubber hand in front of them in synchrony. After a time—the more hypnotisable they are the less you’ll have to wait—they’ll feel as though the rubber hand is a part of their body. Break out a knife or mallet and attack their rubber hand; their subsequent yelp will leave you in no doubt of the depth of the bodily ownership 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 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?
VR films can go further in bridging the empathy gap than any other 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 swiveling our 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.
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 within a virtual reality film.
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 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.
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, the illusion aided by my seated posture. Instead, I was relegated to an interloper the entire time.
A voyeur crowding the main character’s bathroom or her cramped, poster-plastered bedroom; a ghost sunk into the dining room table, swiveling 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 albeit well-meaning ways. I watched this unfold as a fellow passenger. The film would have be so much more powerful and persuasive 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.
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 swiveling 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 an embodied existence—the constellation of physical traits such as sex, race, disability that define us—and its unspooling 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.