Empathic Actualities: Toward a Taxonomy of Empathy in Virtual Reality

“Empathy machine”: how virtual reality affects human rights attitudes

“…This specific term, and the aim of inducing empathy via VR, has often been criticized in regard to the inability of humans to truly know and feel others' experiences. According to this critique, subjects are absorbed, through consumption, and transformed into an object in an attempt to consolidate oneself and the other, ultimately understanding the other through this process (Bollmer, 2017;Fisher, 2017;Hassan, 2019). However, this seems to be a misconception, which may stem from a literal interpretation of popular discourse, as the absolute understanding of another's experiences is not the goal.…”

The Curious Case of the Transdiegetic Cow, or a Mission to Foster Other-Oriented Empathy Through Virtual Reality

“…Particularly, designers and researchers have begun to explore the empathic capacities of games and virtual reality experiences (e.g., [2,8,22,23,32,44,51]). However, we also discerned criticism regarding the employment of virtual reality for the arousal of empathy (e.g., [25,26,65]). In this section, we elaborate on our understanding of empathy, address the criticism and challenges of fostering empathy through virtual reality games, and conclude with design considerations as input for our Research through Design [71] project.…”

“…The recent rise of empathy-arousing virtual reality games may have been fueled by the claims of an "ultimate empathy machine" [49], with Nonny de la Peña arguing that it "is such a visceral empathy generator [...] it can make people feel in a way that nothing, no other platform I've ever worked in can successfully do in this way" [66]. However, we also noticed criticism on the employment of virtual reality to arouse empathy (e.g., [25,26,65]), with arguments that "the VR industry is operating with a muddy, unclear, superficial definition of empathy, one that is forgiving to truisms like 'standing in another person's shoes' " [65]. Aside from the many conceptualizations of empathy that cause confusion, a possible issue with the often sought-after 'standing in another's shoes' experience lies in the resulting experience being self-oriented first, as the result of having users virtually inhabit the perspective of the other in distress.…”

Análisis del reportaje inmersivo de contenido social en los medios periodísticos españoles

“…Analizar la conexión que existe entre la sensación de presencia y la generación de empatía en el reportaje inmersivo en vídeo en 360º a través de un análisis de recepción supera las posibilidades de este artículo. No obstante, algunos estudios recientes (Hill, 2016;Fisher, 2017; Shin y Biocca, 2017 o Archer y Finger, 2018) concluyen que ciertas técnicas narrativas permiten un mayor acercamiento del espectador hacia la historia, lo cual contribuye a favorecer la comprensión de la realidad representada y ayuda al espectador a acercarse al contexto de los protagonistas.…”