Ultimate Empathy Machine Research Articles

From experience to empathy: An empathetic VR-based learning approach to improving EFL learners’ empathy and writing performance

English as a foreign language (EFL) writing is vital in interpersonal and cross-cultural communication. Writing refers to a complicated, dispersed, dialogic, and mediated process of discovery and creation, generally considered to be one of the most challenging skills for EFL learners. Nowadays, some students struggle to create words that resonate with readers since they lack real-life experience and empathy cultivation. Virtual reality (VR) not only provides realistic experiences but is also known as the “ultimate empathy machine.” Therefore, this study proposed an empathetic VR-based learning (E-VRL) approach to provide learners with access to authentic experiences and further promote learner empathy. To assess the validity of this approach, 63 junior high school students were recruited to participate in a quasi-experiment, and were randomly divided into an experimental group (EG) which used the E-VRL approach and a control group (CG) which used the VR-based learning (VRL) approach. The results showed that the E-VRL approach improved students’ cognitive empathy and dialogic empathy more than the VRL approach. Additionally, it was found that students in the EG outperformed those in the CG in terms of the use of ideas and content, word choice, and voice in their writing. This study proves the efficacy of the presented E-VRL approach, and provides valuable insights for future research on the design of VR-based EFL writing activities and VR environments.

VR and empathy: a reappraisal

ABSTRACT Beginning with a close look at the VR ‘apparatus’ – technology plus ideology – this essay seeks to interrogate the phenomenal sway that the notion of VR as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ holds in the public imagination, following Chris Milk’s oft quoted Ted Talk of 2015. Offering a close reading of two seminal VR works – ‘Clouds Over Sidra’ (2015) by Gabo Arora and Chris Milk himself, and ‘Carne y Arena’ (2017) by Alejandro G Iñárritu – along with a range of scholarly studies by traditional critics and writers like Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf as well as a range of contemporary VR scholars, this essay clears the ground for a more sophisticated VR aesthetic to evolve, one that is fully cognizant of both the limitations and risks of the empathy model. As a foundational theory for this emergent medium, it is held that this reappraisal would be of value to VR practitioners, scholars and pedagogues alike.

Should we stop talking about empathy?: Virtual reality, refugee children and the ethics of technology-mediated moral education

ABSTRACT Given much-discussed innovations in Virtual Reality as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’, we offer three provocations regarding the use of Virtual Reality to cultivate empathy: is empathy possible? Is empathy enough? Who controls how empathy is produced, and who is left out? As a case study, we examine the VR films that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has produced about the refugee crisis. Using this as an entry point to discuss the implications for technology-mediated moral education, our analysis aims to provide insights for educators and scholars interested in the use of VR to teach about marginalised communities facing structural injustice. In conclusion, we offer a set of practical considerations to foster reflection on the ethical and effective use of technology in moral education. We advocate for a nuanced approach that emphasises empathy as a catalyst for meaningful change, transforming passive empathy into active solidarity.

Protocol of the study for predicting empathy during VR sessions using sensor data and machine learning.

Virtual reality (VR) technology is often referred to as the 'ultimate empathy machine' due to its capability to immerse users in alternate perspectives and environments beyond their immediate physical reality. In this study, participants will be immersed in 3-dimensional 360° VR videos where actors express different emotions (sadness, happiness, anger, and anxiousness). The primary objective is to investigate the potential relationship between participants' empathy levels and the changes in their physiological attributes. The empathy levels will be self-reported with questionnaires, and physiological attributes will be measured using different sensors. The main outcome of the study will be a machine learning model to predict a person's empathy level based on their physiological responses while watching VR videos. Despite the existence of established methodologies and metrics in research and clinical domains, our aim is to contribute to addressing the gap of a universally accepted "gold standard" for assessing empathy. Additionally, we expect to deepen our understanding of the relationship between different emotions and psychological attributes, gender differences in empathy, and the impact of narrative context on empathic responses.

The “ultimate empathy machine” as technocratic solutionism? Audience reception of the distant refugee crisis through virtual reality

ABSTRACT This article aims to deconstruct the myth of technological utopianism which contends that immersive virtual reality (VR) can inevitably lead to a more moral and egalitarian world due to its promises of copresence, immediacy and transcendence in humanitarian communication. The problématique we explore is whether existing VR artifacts, as exemplars of the “ultimate empathy machine,” construct a technocratic solutionism which becomes constitutive of humanitarian crises themselves. Drawing upon empirical material from focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with VR audiences in China, Germany, and the UK, the findings show that VR may easily construct a depoliticized hyperreality of intense spectacularity and trap audiences within an improper distance, thereby reworking the colonial legacies of humanitarianism while also obfuscating complex asymmetries of power and structural political exclusion. These findings have important implications for reminding humanitarian news organizations and aid agencies that they should not rely entirely on the particular affordances of VR to gain a moral bond with the distant refugee crisis.

Rage against the empathy machine revisited: The ethics of empathy-related affordances of virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) has been designated as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ due to its alleged ability to powerfully immerse users in another’s perspective. As VR has attracted growing attention, criticism of its alleged ‘empathic superpowers' has also gained strength. Critics have recently argued that the empathic VR vision is ethically flawed since it is misleading and denies non-communicable aspects of the Other. Moreover, several scholars argue that VR empathy rhetoric in fact exploits the marginalised targets of empathy, turning them to objects ‘identity tourism’ for the privileged. The paper revisits these claims, arguing that they rely on empathy notions that are dominant in traditional art-media, while overlooking VR’s unique experiential affordances. Drawing on psychophysiological evidence, it argues that the ethical significance of VR lies in the unique ways in which it manipulates the user’s body scheme via multisensory stimulation. These manipulations result in unprecedented empathy-related perceptual and conceptual transformations whose ethical implications require new ethical framing.

The limits of humanisation: ‘ideal’ figures of the refugee and depoliticisation of displacement in virtual reality filmClouds Over Sidra

The enthusiastic embrace of virtual reality films as ‘the ultimate empathy machine’ by humanitarian organisations and technology companies can be positioned as an attempt to change attitudes towards refugees through a strategy of ‘humanisation’. This article offers a critique of humanising approaches to displacement as they manifest in the United Nations’ first-ever virtual reality film Clouds Over Sidra (2015), targeted at policy makers, donors, and the general public in the Global North. Through an experiential and textual analysis of the film, I analyse two strategies of humanisation in Clouds Over Sidra: reproduction of ‘ideal’ figures of the refugee through the depiction of daily life in Za’atari camp and overrepresentation of children, and depoliticisation of displacement via technological disembodiment in the film. The former results in a never-ending search for purity, and the latter depoliticises displacement through an erasure of differential exposure to colonial and racial regimes of im/mobility. I argue that humanising approaches based on a logic of inclusion ultimately affirm the colonial and racial hierarchy of humanity as they leave unquestioned the already colonial and racial nature of ‘the human’. This article provides an original contribution to debates about VR technology, empathy, and displacement by going beyond a generalised critique of VR films to foreground a critique of humanising approaches to displacement. I conclude by asking what it might mean to think about displacement relationally, an approach that is grounded in a politics of location and global relations of power.

Being Somebody Else: The Future of Narrative Storytelling

The authors discuss virtual reality (VR) in relation to its characterisation as the “ultimate empathy machine” that allows passive spectators of fictional or non-fictional narratives to become active agents of unfolding events. They concentrate on how the change in the form of the narrative through immersive VR impacts the audience, stressing the difference between the position of the spectator in an ongoing storyline and being a spectator engaged with elements of the story’s narrative. The possibility of acting on behalf of the Other can activate empathic responses, which in turn may lead to a more direct integration of the characters’ perspectives into the life experience of the VR user. The authors relate to several experiments and offer their conlusions

The Effects of a VR Teaching Tool on Understanding, Comfortability, Compassion, and Empathy of Students and Caregivers

Empathetic care giving is associated with improved patient satisfaction, compliance and outcomes; clinical competence, career satisfaction, and burnout reduction; as well as diminished medical errors and litigation claims. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown erosion in empathy and compassion across the health professions. Virtual reality shows promise as a teaching tool to combat this decline as it has been dubbed the ultimate empathy machine, allowing users to vividly and viscerally experience any situation from any perspective. Embodied Labs allows users to virtually walk in the shoes of different patients, experiencing symptoms, family dynamics, support networks and various components of the health care systems. We have demonstrated that the high level of immersion and presence afforded by these virtual labs are effective pedagogical tools to increase understanding, comfortability, compassion and empathy within various populations including informal caregivers, high school students, health professional students and medical students.

Exposure to social suffering in virtual reality boosts compassion and facial synchrony

Virtual reality (VR) has recently been popularized as the “ultimate empathy machine,” and yet the science behind the effects of VR on empathy is scarce. In this media-comparison study, we assessed the impact of VR upon physiological and subjective indicators of empathy. Furthermore, we investigated the role of social presence, i.e. the experience of being there with real others, in modulating the empathic responses. We filmed a 360° 3D video of a person disclosing a painful autobiographical story from her past. This empathy-eliciting video was presented either in a VR head-mounted display or on a computer screen. Centrally, autonomic and facial responses were recorded both from the target in the video and from participants who viewed the video. We found that the VR condition enhanced viewers’ empathic care and facial synchrony with the target. Viewers in the VR condition also reported higher levels of social presence, which mediated the effects of VR on empathic care as well as on facial synchrony. The current study highlights the potential of VR to elicit social connectedness and a caring motivation to help. Our findings imply that VR has a unique potential to motivate empathy in situations where face-to-face encounters are not possible.

How Does It Feel to Be a Woman Victim of Sexual Harassment? The Effect of 360°-Video-Based Virtual Reality on Empathy and Related Variables.

Sexual harassment (SH) occurs when people-mostly women-are targets of unwanted sexual comments, gestures, or actions associated with a lack of empathy on the part of the offender. Virtual Reality (VR) has been defined as the "ultimate empathy machine" because it allows the user to take other people's perspective. The present work aims to study the effect of a 360°-video-based VR experience (vs. traditional perspective-taking task) on empathy and related concepts (i.e., violent attitude, perspective taking, sense of oneness) toward a female victim of SH in a male sample. A within-subjects design was used with 44 men who experienced both conditions (360° and narrative). Results showed the superiority of the 360°-video experience over the narrative in increasing empathy, sense of oneness, and perspective taking toward a female victim of SH. Limitations and future directions are discussed.

What makes immersive virtual reality the ultimate empathy machine? Discerning the underlying mechanisms of change

Recent research has emphasized the promise of Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) to bolster empathy. The underlying mechanisms of such an intriguing outcome are, however, underexplored. The present study examines the effect of distinct but interrelated user experiences (UX) dimensions underlying the bolstering effect of IVR on empathy. Sixty-five young adults participated in five 1-h weekly programs encompassing a total of 25 IVR experiences of different nature. Following each session, participants rated their UX of immersion-presence, illusion of body ownership, illusion of agency, engagement, and IVR-triggered mind-wandering for each IVR experience. Baseline empathy, operationalized in a multifaceted fashion, was measured both before and after the IVR program, spanning a total of seven weeks. Empathy significantly increased after the program with a moderate effect size (d = .52). Further, 27.6% of the variance in empathy change was explained by the combined effect of the UX variables. The largest predictors were illusion of body ownership and agency. The pattern of results was the same across types of IVR experience, suggesting that media content (whether empathy-evoking or not), did not moderate the relationship between UX and empathy. Together, this study highlights that IVR is more an effective “perspective taking-machine” than “empathy machine” per se.

Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy

Virtual reality (VR)’s newly virtuous identity as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ arrives during an overtly xenophobic, racist, misogynist, and Islamophobic moment in the US and abroad. Its rise also overlaps with the digital industries’ attempts to defend themselves against increasingly vocal critique. VR’s new identity as an anti-racist and anti-sexist technology that engineers the right kind of feeling has emerged to counter and manage the image of the digital industries as unfeeling and rapacious. In this article, the author engages with VR titles created by white and European producers that represent the lives of black and Middle Eastern women and girls in Lebanon, Nairobi, and Paris. She argues that the invasion of personal and private space that documentary VR titles ‘for good’ create is a spurious or ‘toxic empathy’ that enables white viewers to feel that they have experienced authentic empathy for these others, and this digitally mediated compassion is problematically represented in multiple media texts as itself a form of political activism.

Walking in someone else’s shoes: creating empathy in the practice of immersive film

ABSTRACTThe rise and accessibility of virtual reality and 360-degree film has led to the assertion that it is an empathy generator (De La Peña, N., P. Well, J. Liobera, E. Giannopoulos, A. Pomés, B. Spanlang, D. Friedman, M. Sanchez- Vives, and M. Slater. 2010. “Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 19 (4): 291–301. http://hdl.handle.net/2445/52803; Milk 2015. How Virtual Reality can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine. Accessed February 9, 2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine) allowing for a greater level of immersion on the part of the ‘experiencer’ than traditional film enables (Jones, S. 2017. “Disrupting the Narrative: Immersive Journalism in Virtual Reality.” Journal of Media Practice 18 (2–3): 171–185). Films created for a user to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’ have been used to explore ideas including mobility (StoryUp 2016), health conditions (Gauntlett 2015) and immigration (Milk 2015. How Virtual Reality can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine. Accessed February 9, 2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine) and are increasingly being used by third-sector organisations and the United Nations because of their power as a tool to help understanding of social issues.This paper seeks to critically investigate the concept of empathy within film practice and explore how emerging technologies potentially enable a significant shift in the audience’s experience of a subject. Through a study of immersive films and interviews with leading creators, the notions of empathy-driven practice are interrogated and critiqued. The study provides conditions for future immersive filmic practice that, through using non-directed narratives, involves the creation of a space in which experiencers of immersive experiences can gain an increased awareness of space, place and social relations which can lead to positive societal change without requiring the need for empathy.

Virtual Trauma: Prospects for Automediality

Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes...