Immersive Empathy
How artists and designers of color are using virtual reality and augmented reality to explore race and expose bias.
Immersive technology can let you literally see the world from someone else’s perspective. And according to a study by the Institute of Neurosciences, such technology — including virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) — can be used to fight racist attitudes. This may explain why so many creatives and educators of color are keen to experiment with it. While VR provides a completely simulated experience, AR allows images and graphics to be superimposed on a real physical environment. Both have been used in projects from eye-opening documentaries to ambitious history projects.
Charity Everett, a creative technologist and research fellow at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, found immersive technology to be the ideal medium for her Afrofuturistic project “Go Back Fetch It,” which maps different phases of humanity. To interact with “Go Back Fetch It,” participants scan a physical wood-burned object, which is also an AR trigger. They then find themselves in a cave that grows around them and are invited to share the emotions of a prehistoric African character named Eve as she learns how to survive in her environment. The audience is made to feel as if they’re right beside her as she discovers fire and completes other milestones of human development. As the story progresses, connections are made to the Middle Passage (the sea route by which millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade), the current uprising in Brazil, and other events, weaving in documentaries by other creators.
Everett, who recently won the Nextant Prize’s rising star award, says this ongoing project aims to “challenge consensus reality through bringing to life Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and illuminating people’s misconceptions, beginning with the fallacy of the Mercator map. I always knew I wanted to tell a story similar to this that contextualized my existence within the greater arc of history. Nothing seemed like it could be an encompassing and cohesive way to present my overarching goal until I discovered AR and VR.” (The Mercator map, a standard map in generations of classrooms, has been blamed for fostering a Eurocentric worldview because of its distortions that show Greenland the same size as Africa.)
The story of “Another Dream”
For film-maker Tamara Shogaolu, VR was by far the most compelling way to document the true story of a lesbian couple seeking to escape the turmoil of the Arab Spring and seek asylum in the Netherlands. Her animated VR documentary, “Another Dream,” which debuted at this year’s Tribeca film festival, is based on oral histories that she collected over a 10-year period. Using a VR device, viewers of this documentary trace words in Arabic to transition between scenes. As they do so, the 360° animation, striking visuals, and first-person audio accounts combine to emphasize the subjects’ point of view.
Says Shogaolu, “I was living in Egypt when the revolution happened. I travelled around Egypt after the Arab Spring and started to notice the growing LGBT movement. I focused attention mainly on women and people from marginalised communities.”
Shogaolu and her documentary subjects discussed how it felt to be women of color in mostly white spaces, and she wanted to capture that feeling as accurately as possible. “I had so much content and I felt that putting it into a feature film would make it less nuanced,” she says. “I wanted to focus on the journey of choosing what would make you want to leave your home, and then [on] how to make a home in a new place, especially in the current climate. VR allowed audiences to personally experience that and know how it felt. You couldn’t really do that in film.”
Exposing bias in education
Immersive tech is also being used to change attitudes about race in more formal settings. Clorama Dorvilias founded her company DebiasVR to provide bias testing and training for companies. Her Oculus-funded Teacher’s Lens project, for example, uses VR to simulate a diverse classroom with the overall aim of reducing bias in education. Teachers participate using an Oculus headset and app, which allows them to examine who they call on in class, and how quickly they do it. After the teachers reveal their student preferences, their behavioural data is collected and shared with other teachers around the world to provide a virtual mirror of accountability.
Dorvilias told me in a recent conversation, “I chose VR as a focus because the research I did exploring solutions to empathy development in correlation to reducing negative social biases led me to this technology as the most efficient immersive solution.” She was surprised to learn how many professionals were clamouring for a tool to help them get a sense of how they unconsciously interact with people. “We were excited to gain access to tools that they believed could help them be in alignment with their values. Granted, there definitely are a lot of people who have been resistant to this type of solution — particularly, those who really pride themselves on their identity [as] an inclusive person,” she says.
According to Dorvilias, the resistance stemmed from people not understanding how unconscious bias is actually not within our control. “They usually assume that if they are shown to have an unconscious preference influenced by skin color or gender, etc, they fear that they will be perceived as, or will have to change their self-perception to, someone who’s racist or sexist. Yet, that’s not the case at all,” she says. After all, that’s why it’s called unconscious bias.
Unintended consequences
Having also secured a role as a rotating product manager at Facebook on the Oculus for Enterprise team, Dorvilias is at the forefront of the immersive tech industry. She agrees the technology is great for exploring issues around race, but cautions that “it’s also a very powerful one, in that what can be a positively enlightening for some demographics, can be triggering and even traumatizing for others. It’s a super-powerful medium, but the type of content someone is immersed in will always have a different type of impact. So designers of these experiences really need to be mindful of the audiences they are building for, and have a concrete idea of what type of emotional impact they are seeking and why.”
VR is well-suited to fostering empathy because of the way it forces an audience to experience — rather than merely witness — a protagonist’s struggles. Because VR places you in the center of the action, it is much harder to tune out or look away, as you might do when watching a non-VR film or reading a book. This is backed by a Stanford study, which created a VR project about homelessness. The users who tested out the project developed longer-lasting compassion towards homeless people, compared to those who explored other mediums of the scenario, such as text.
There is also something profoundly compelling about being forced to walk in the shoes of another, which is why VR lends itself particularly well to projects centered around race. Empathy and understanding are at the core of such projects, regardless of whether they set out to educate or entertain. We may not learn the true of impact of AR and VR for some time, but as these projects demonstrate, their potential to create a fairer and more equitable society cannot be underestimated.
Tola Onanuga is a London-based writer specializing in technology and culture. Her work has been published in the Guardian and WIRED, where she previously worked on staff, as well as the Independent, Prospect, Dazed, and Huck magazine.
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