From an Observer to a Participant
Last Wednesday, we checked out House of VR to explore how virtual reality (VR) can augment our capacity to empathize. There, we watched two VR documentaries, Clouds over Sidra, which brought us to the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, and Cut Off, which took us two First Nations communities- Shoal Lake 40 and Cross Lake. In addition to the documentaries, we had a chance to dive into the world of Google Earth VR.
Although Google Earth VR was designed for a different purpose compared to the two documentaries, I felt Google Earth VR was able to immerse the VR user as a participant in the experience, while in the documentaries, the user remained an observer. If future VR documentaries (perhaps there needs to be a new name for these “documentaries”!) can move the VR user away from a being passive observer to being an active participant in the experience, then the potential of VR, beyond current modes of technology, to build empathy can be more fully realized.
When watching the two documentaries, where that boundary between being an observer towards being a participant shifted for me was when I could get at the same height level and can look into the eyes of those in the documentaries. In Clouds over Sidra, when the VR camera lowered, I felt as if I was sitting just next to Sidra and her family.
To empathize is often said to be able to walk in another person’s shoes- watching a documentary as an observer, even if the environment is visually all around you, still isn’t the same as stepping into the world within which a person has to make daily decisions based on constraints and opportunities, structured by entrenched institutions. I couldn’t help but be reminded of another VR short I experienced earlier this year, Extravaganza, where I became a puppet in a puppet show, watched and “consumed” by an executive. The feeling of a pair of eyes staring at me and the prejudices projected on me, as the puppet, made me feel both widely uncomfortable and aware (though not an entirely new feeling).
This morning, I read an interview on NOW magazine with actor/writer Lena Waithe which I felt resonated with what VR documentaries that set out to build empathy aim to do. Waithe wrote an iconic episode on the show Master of None, which reflected her experience coming out as a queer, black woman, at her family Thanksgiving dinner. On that, she says: “I know that there are people who look at Thanksgiving who aren’t Black, queer or female and they go, ‘I see myself in that story’ or ‘I can see the humanity in the show.’ That’s when art is doing its job.” Skillful expressions of art can accomplish this- perhaps the future of VR documentaries can take that even further by actively changing the role of an observer into a participant to fully take advantage of the technology.
