Intentional Design Key to Promoting Empathy in Virtual Reality
Exploring How VR Can Boost Empathy
The notion that Virtual Reality (VR) automatically enhances empathy is being reconsidered by researchers at Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. Their IEEE VR award-winning paper, “”, challenges the notion that VR inherently fosters the ability for people to understand others' perspectives.
They challenge the belief that VR makes users feel like someone else solely through immersion. Instead, their experiments show that perspective-taking is better when users are given specific tasks that make them actively think about the character's viewpoint.
The researchers highlight the importance of intentionality in VR design that allows for active cognitive engagement. It is through these measures that the power of VR as an “empathy machine” can be effectively harnessed.
Congratulations to the authors Eugene Kukshinov; Federica Gini; Anchit Mishra; Nicholas Bowman; Brendan Rooney; Lennart E. Nacke for winning Best Paper at (The Premier International Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces).
Read the full paper,