Virtual reality as an empathy machine and its discontent

This article is adapted from my research recently published in Postcolonial Theory and Crisis, titled “Post-Humanitarianism and the Crisis of Empathy.” For a more detailed account of my research, see here.

This article is also in conversation with two previous pieces published in CAVRN: Exploring ‘proper distance’ in virtual reality for humanitarian practice and Virtual reality and refugee crises: Impact of “Clouds Over Sidra.”

VR as an empathy machine

Artificial intelligence (AI) innovations and virtual reality (VR) technologies have been increasingly used to develop computer-generated simulations that place viewers in three-dimensional environments reproducing war zones, disaster areas, or refugee camps. The immersive experiences proposed by VR, when compared to previous two-dimensional imagery, promise to defeat compassion fatigue (Boltanski, 1999; Möller, 1998; Sontag, 2003) and reactivate the connection between donors and beneficiaries. Specifically, VR allows donors to step into other people’s shoes and experience what it is like being a refugee within the safe space of technology (Raessens, 2019; Uricchio, 2018).

However, this enthusiasm for the potential of VR is coupled with some ethical reservations—especially in relation to an emerging genre of VR experiences dealing with humanitarian crises, migration, and refugee issues.

On one hand, such personalized and flexible immersive experiences risk invoking senses of “ceremonial humanitarianism” (Chouliaraki, 2013: 13) and “compassionate consensus” (Fassin, 2011: 176). Yet, VR offers tremendous opportunities not only for the tech industry and the humanitarian sectors, but also for artists, refugees, and activists. These groups can use the new affordances engendered by VR to reach new publics and create different forms of storytelling and interactive techniques that emphasize empathy and generate attention, interest, and support for many migrants and refugees whose plights may have fallen under the radar of urgent crisis.

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“Yet, VR offers tremendous opportunities not only for the tech industry and the humanitarian sectors, but also for artists, refugees, and activists.”

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There seems to be a consensus among different creators about the unique qualities of VR and the advantages of using this new technology for humanitarian crises. As Nonny de la Peña states, VR technology, first developed in the 1980s and 1990s, is now hailed as “a visceral empathy generator. It can make people feel in a way that nothing, no other platform I’ve ever worked in can” (Volpe, 2015). Likewise, Chris Milk in his influential TED Talk calls VR “the ultimate empathy machine” (2015) as it allows us to step into other people’s shoes and feel what it is like to be a refugee and be there with them; “it is a machine but inside it feels like real life, it feels like truth.”

For Silverstein (2015), VR creates the experience of being present in distant worlds, making it uniquely suited to projects such as The Displaced, produced by the New York Times (see Figure 1), that “speak to our senses of empathy and community.” This is why VR experiences are better understood as “actual experiences” rather than “media experiences” because they “feel real” (Bailenson, 2018: 46). VR reduces the imaginative work required when reading a book or watching a movie as the viewer can “feel” what it is like to be there (Bailenson, 2018: 84).

The empathy machine and its discontent

The enthusiastic embrace of VR as the ultimate tool for stepping into other people’s shoes and experiencing other realities that might be different and unknown to us, such as the distant suffering of migrants and refugees can be exciting. However, it may also be extremely problematic. As Bimbisar Irom writes, the use of VR for humanitarian advocacy may end up flattening the real differences between sufferers and spectators. Consequently, spectators can comfortably stay in their safe zones and get a kick through experiencing temporary “co-suffering” that can be stopped at any time. This creates what Nash has described as “improper distance” by translating the irreducible alterity into familiarity and intimacy (Nash, 2018).

Lisa Nakamura asserts that VR works as a form of identity tourism—touring the lives of others, who are the embodiment and spectacle of pain and suffering (Nakamura, 2020). VR puts the viewer, often the Western spectator, in the shoes of others. These “others” mostly figure as children, women, refugees, minorities, and people of color whose narratives and enforced hospitality in their personal VR domestic space pose as one more example of digital labor and digital exploitation. Immersive embodied experiences enabled by VR (and corresponding feelings of co-presence) thus lead to the further victimization and appropriation of already disenfranchised people. VR risks becoming just one more form of consumerism and narcissism—a safe way to temporarily experience uncomfortable and confrontational realities without putting yourself at risk (Andrejevic & Volcic, 2020; Grunewald & Witteborn, 2020; Hassapopoulou, 2018).

Therefore, Nakamura concludes that this is a “toxic empathy” that enables white viewers to experience digitally mediated compassion from the safe space of their location, where mobility can be navigated at one’s will. This contrasts with the “stuckness” (Hage, 2009) of the people represented, stuck in camps, who have their hospitality towards the Western gazer in their domestic space enforced upon them. Women and children, who represent innocence and an “infantilization of peace” (Malkki, 2010), continue to offer “invisible labor” in the form of digital presence in their war-torn homes, refugee camps, favelas, and immiserated spaces.

Future directions

The current study made clear the underlying psychological mechanism leading to intention to share information, suggesting the pivotal role of empathy in the viewers. Although previous studies generally agreed that the immersive nature of the computer-generated environment created by VR technology has the capacity to boost empathy in the viewers, the link between empathy aroused in the viewers and their subsequent intention to share information remained largely unclear. Previous studies (e.g., Altay & Labonte, 2014; Prajogo & Olhager, 2012; Sakurai & Murayama, 2019) suggested that raising awareness and enhanced information sharing are critical for the alleviation of the crises. As demonstrated by the current study, where VR technology was employed, the role of viewers’ empathetic experience was proven to be the critical mediator in leading to prosocial behavioral intention to share information.

VR is a wonderful tool for thinking about current crises and issues of representation, engagement, and civic action. It should certainly be embraced as a new technology that can bring about change and reach out to wider audiences, who would otherwise not be affected by or implicated in questions of global crises and humanitarian relief. Yet, as with any technology, it is deeply enmeshed with the tech sector. Therefore, like many non-profit organizations in a post-humanitarian age, it inevitably follows a neo-liberal model that prioritizes monetization and economic revenue. Furthermore, it taps into a recent trend of self-aggrandizement and narcissistic gratification that Western viewers prioritize through feelings of empathy and “real experience” that ultimately only further dispossesses and racializes the other, distant sufferer. That sufferer has no choice in the format of their representation and is often involved, without consultation, in productions spearheaded by Western companies and clearly targeted at Western consumers with an ambivalent gesture towards inclusion, equality, familiarity, and intimacy.

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“There is a need to critically understand new technologies not only as empowering and innovative, but also as carrying implicit bias and detrimental effects for vulnerable groups who are often not at the table with designers, programmers, and tech companies.”

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There is a need to critically understand new technologies not only as empowering and innovative, but also as carrying implicit bias and detrimental effects for vulnerable groups who are often not at the table with designers, programmers, and tech companies. What could be realized with the thrust for innovation and technology that achieves the impossible can backfire if such technology is not understood within a socio-critical context where humans from different backgrounds are taken into account—thus avoiding easy universalisms and stereotypes.

How do we move forward from these assumptions? First, this would imply envisioning VR not as an “empathy machine,” but through a reorientation of positionality. “VR as empathy machine” is used for short-term and volatile immersion, geared towards narcissistic self-gratification as a do-gooder. It is important to leverage immersive experiences of VR for the benefit of migrants and refugees themselves while avoiding identity tourism and hierarchies between viewers and actors.

Second, the focus should not just be on extraordinary experiences but on everyday mundane events. While Bailenson (2018) states that VR is too expensive to use for normal things and should be developed to experience the extraordinary (such as flying above buildings, swimming with tropical fish in the coral reefs, landing on the moon, growing as a tree, etc.), in VR for humanitarianism, the “extraordinary” often involves disaster tourism or poverty porn. As such, it would be worthwhile to focus not on spectacular things, but on ordinary problems: the at times negative aspects such as “diaspora boredom,” the feeling of apathy, “stuckness,” and the melancholy that migrants and refugees experience in their daily lives. Moreover, representations of migrant women are often limited to gendered roles like cooking, rearing children, or providing schooling, with restricted mobility both in space (restricted to refugee camps, ethnic neighbourhoods, or the home) and in a social sense (Bourdieu’s habitus) with little upward mobility.

Third, VR should be deployed not to solicit pity or compassion, but to achieve social justice. Therefore, VR should focus not on empathy as pity, but on the politics of injustice in which VR gives insight into the violation of human rights, integration challenges, and social isolation to advocate for systemic change—not just “feeling what it is like.”

Finally, it is important to develop new haptic functions and music scores with the collaboration of migrant artists and co-creators to defy stereotypical representations of pain, fear, danger, or sadness, as well as contribute to the development of alternative VR-scapes and immersive modalities (Nordahl & Nilsson, 2014). Many VR productions have a very discordant soundscape or use background music that either verges towards sentimentalism or is totally disconnected from the cultures and people represented. Therefore, more research is needed to steer the development of VR towards more responsible, accountable, and equitable productions, especially in the field of humanitarianism.

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Recommended citation

Ponzanesi, S. (July, 2024). Virtual reality as an empathy machine and its discontent. Critical Augmented and Virtual Reality Researchers Network (CAVRN). https://cavrn.org/virtual-reality-as-an-empathy-machine-and-its-discontent/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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