Some researchers believe that virtual reality (VR) technology can provide participants with an immersive experience of global disasters, evoking their sympathy and making the world a better place. There are also some researchers who hold the opposite view. They think that what the world needs is not more sympathy, but justice.
You stand on a street in Syria and suddenly hear the explosion, fluttering around, and you are rushing to find a shelter. You met a Palestinian woman in Gaza and she lost her son in the attack of the Israel Defense Forces. You spent a few hours in Nepal with a teenage girl to see how she tried to rebuild her life after the earthquake. You are with the tramp in Los Angeles. You are a black man. You are a woman who is being sexually assaulted. Then you take off your VR eye mask and go back to the real world.
More and more artists, social activists and human rights organizations believe that VR technology can save the world, or at least improve the world.
In recent years, there have been dozens of VR projects that have allowed viewers (more precisely, participants) to get some experience in a more intimate way than ever before. Researchers say this intimate experience enhances people's compassion. If we bring a person to the war scene in Syria through VR technology, he will feel that if he is really there, he will be more concerned about it. If we put a white man in a black body, he will become less racist.
VR film production company Within director and CE0 Chris Milk said that VR is a "sympathetic machine." Milk is one of the outstanding creators of the VR field and is called "VR Master" by Varigy magazine. In 2015, he collaborated with the United Nations to produce the VR film Clouds Over Sidra, which tells the story of a 12-year-old Syrian girl in a Jordanian refugee camp. The audience wearing the VR eye mask viewed the refugee camp from a 360-degree perspective. Milk believes that when we "sit" in the room with the girl instead of seeing her through the TV screen, we feel the same about her situation and sympathize with her more deeply.
The United Nations broadcasted "Clouds Over Sidra" in a fundraising event for Syria in Kuwait. To the surprise of the staff, the fundraising event raised $3.8 billion, almost double the expected fundraising and $1.2 billion more than the previous year. Since then, the United Nations has produced more VR documentaries for a project called UNVR to raise awareness of disaster-affected areas around the world.
If you have a VR eye patch, you can download and watch VR movies like Beyond the Lake, Waves of Grace and Ground Beneath Her. "Beyond the Lake" tells the life of Burundian refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; "Waves of Grace" tells the story of a woman living in Liberia in the victim of the Ebola virus; "Ground Beneath Her" is about Nepal after the 2015 earthquake Scene.
In March last year, another VR film "My Mother's Wing" of the UN UNVR project was released at the Tel Aviv Center for Contemporary Art. The film brought participants to Gaza to witness a life of a mother of Palestine under the influence of the "OperaTIon ProtecTIve Edge", a war launched by Israel in the summer of 2014.
Amnesty InternaTIonal also uses VR technology to win more donors. According to Amnesty International’s report, donor humanitarian contributions increased by 16% after watching a VR documentary about the Syrian civil war. Last month, Milke introduced his VR short film to 1,200 spectators at a TED conference. Milk said that the number of viewers at the conference was the highest in VR history.
The British BBC also launched the VR short film "We Wait" last month, which tells the story of a group of Syrian refugees sitting in a crumbling rubber boat across the Mediterranean to Europe. Another notable creator in the VR field is documentary director Nonny de laPe&nTIlde;a. Nonny de laPeña is a pioneer of "immersive news." In 2012, he produced the VR film "Hunger in Los Angeles", recreating a true story of a hungry people waiting in the long queue to wait for disaster relief food distribution, and finally unbearable and fainted.
Talking to a Palestinian wizard
Unlike artists, scientists who study the effects of VR on human brains and behavior recognize that although VR may lead to long-term changes in human behavior, the path to this goal is long.
Dr. Doron Friedman and Beatrice Ha, at the Advanced Virtuality Lab at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel Dr. Béatrice Hasler studied the impact of the VR experience on human behavior. They developed a VR project that allowed users to meet and talk to a Palestinian wizard called Jamil. They did an operation on a group of participants: when they sat down and talked to Jamil's avatar, Jamil began to imitate their body language. Friedman and Hasler found that members of the group showed more sympathy to Jamil than members of other groups. However, the study found that the participants’ position on the Palestinians has not changed. Friedman believes that this result shows that VR can evoke basic sympathy, but not enough to have a general impact.
Another type of VR project that attempts to evoke sympathy allows participants to virtually enter another person's body and view the world through another person's eyes. The creators of these projects believe that entering another person's body (even if it lasts for a short time) can increase sympathy for that person.
Friedman explained that VR can evoke hallucinations and make the human brain think that the virtual incarnation is our own. This illusion is called "body ownership."
Even if we know that it is not our own body, the visual and sensory experience is stronger than this.
He added that a series of studies have shown that this experience affects the basic irrational mechanisms of the brain, such as fear and pulse rate, which create an illusion that you are someone else. "This is a fact: I saw my body in the virtual world, I ordered my hand to move, it did move. This is enough," he said.
Friedman said research has shown that entering another person's body will immediately have a psychological impact. If we are placed in the body of a certain type of person, we will easily demonstrate the patterns of behavior of such people. “The second generation of research shows that if we put an adult into a child's body, his behavior will be more “naive.†If we put someone into the body of a musician, he can learn to drum faster. .
In addition, studies have shown that VR can influence the racist tendencies in people's subconscious. When whites are "invested" in black incarnations, their subconscious racist prejudice against blacks is immediately weakened.
A month ago, Mel Slater, one of the most famous VR researchers and professor at the University of Barcelona, ​​conducted a groundbreaking study. Professor Slater studied whether the virtual “body ownership†of VR participants by regular reinforcement would lead to permanent changes in participants' behavior. Slater's research shows that the weakening of racism in the subconscious still exists for at least a week after the experiment and is enhanced with more intensive training.
What is needed is justice, not compassion
But there are also some researchers who disagree. New York University lecturer Robert Young believes that the sympathy evoked by most VR projects is unreliable. Robert said that a person had no sympathy until he wore a VR eye mask for five minutes. This assumption is embarrassing.
Robert cited a paper published in Psychology Today in 2015. The study examined whether a game based on the lives of poor people really increased the sympathy of gamers for the poor. Studies have shown that this game actually reduces the sympathy of gamers to the poor, because most players come to the conclusion that poverty is due to people making the wrong choice, not fate.
Even if some VR projects can really increase human sympathy, can sympathy make the world a better place? Some studies in recent years have shown that sympathy can also lead to bad results, and it can become a tool in the hands of cynical politicians.
Politicians know how to use sympathy for this sentiment and use it for their political purposes. There are many such examples. In the US general election, presidential candidate Donald Trump hopes to cause Americans to have a deeper resentment against immigrants, so he talks about a young man named "Kate" (he never disclosed her last name) in his campaign speech. Woman, the woman was murdered in San Francisco by illegal immigrants from Mexico.
Researchers Rane Willerslev and Nils Ole Bubandt of Aarhus University in Denmark have proposed a term called tactical empathy to illustrate the moral contradiction of sympathy: it allows a person to better understand Others, it also increases the chance that this person will hurt others.
Some opponents believe that VR is not to let users experience the life of others. On the contrary, it is a tool of narcissism, even a tool of racism. When a white person enters a black body, he feels a catharsis.
“What we need is more justice than sympathy,†said Wendy HK Chun, a new media theorist and professor of modern culture at Brown University, recently at the VR conference in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Wendy HK Chun explained that when a white man enters the black body, he turns the avatar into a subject that must be conquered. According to her, VR does not bring about the political action that the world really needs. Or as she said, "If you put on someone else's shoes... you take their shoes."
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