VR and Empathy

I went to comment on a post before class and realized my post never uploaded! 

    Chris Milk’s TED Talk “VR is the Ultimate Empathy Machine” talked about how much humility and empathy VR can give people by experiencing situations in a non-direct way that still impact them so heavily. Milk talked about the power behind the videos that they used for their VR experience with participants and how impactful the interactions were to them. He talks about future projects that he wishes to film that would be similar to this original piece, where he would use empathy to get people engaged, and then educate them on scenarios that they would otherwise never have access to. In this case, it was showing the viewers how you can make the world a better place when showing how poverty can look in other places in the world. This seemingly affective strategy of informing people could open the doors to a new way that we are able to gather information and make these pressing matters more known and understood to other parts of the world. The mindset of feeling sad for others but not making a change because it doesn’t affect you, is the reason why so many pressing issues aren’t changing in the world, and this new technology could possibly change this outlook on life. Milk asked himself, “…is there a way that I could use modern and developing technologies to tell stories in different ways and tell different kinds of stories that I couldn’t tell using the traditional tools of filmmaking that we have been using for 100 years? So I started experimenting, and what I was trying to do was to build the ultimate empathy machine.” 

    A piece of electronic literature that is similar to the VR story that we interacted with in class, was Seymour & Lerhn’s VR story of Hansel and Gretel. You go through the children’s book with it being read to you, while you are within the story watching it play out as if you are within the pages of the book. It is solid pictures, not a video, that you can move around in 360° to see your entire surroundings much like our in-class project. This made storytelling very engaging, as a video could become slightly more distracting from the story, or not be as impactful as the solid image when you are trying to recreate the feeling of it being told out of a book. This book in particular has traditionally been read throughout generations in the format of a physical copy, so the story of Hansel and Gretel in particular was really important to keep that storybook aspect to it, and I think the designers did a really good job at keeping its original feeling. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wksgo776Oyo&t=72s