Shades of Empathy: How Immersive Storytelling Challenges the Way We Feel toward Others

This talk looks to unpack the methods of how we can build mixed reality (VR + AR) in ways to aid initiatives looking to bring about new understanding of our complexed past and connect with those who lived it. As an example, I will present both the “I Am A Man VR Experience,” and “Barnstormers: Determined to Win” as contemporary precedents that use VR technology to place audiences directly in the center of our historical past. For “I Am A Man” users are placed in the center of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike and are allowed to see events leading to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In Barnstormers, audiences are introduced to the triumph and struggles of Negro League Baseball, as one takes the field to play “America’s favorite past time” in a segregated society. Both examples have been critically examined and praised for their artistry and quality of work, but it is this work’s social impact that we will discuss further in depth.

These VR projects have helped pave the way for an entirely new method to use media as an “empathy tool.” For example, we will see how the “I Am a Man'' VR experience was later adopted in a curriculum to help foster new conversations between police officers and the communities they serve. Mixed Reality for Social Impact is work that enables empathy exchange and enables communities to better understand each other’s perspectives; my belief is that VR can help give people an opportunity to experience what it’s like to walk in each other’s shoes, thus gaining a better understanding of one another.