The experience talks about how the blind focus on objects and try to decipher what they’re experiencing. Any visual component in the experience is not an accurate portrayal of blindness, but Notes on Blindness does a great job of showing how concentration and reliance on other senses (specifically hearing in this case) can create a compelling landscape [2]. Though the experience can get apprehensive, there is this optimistic theme of how our heightened aural senses, that contribute to adapting to being blind, is a coping mechanism and it leads to beautiful interpretations of the world around us.

 

I believe “Notes on Blindness” did a fantastic job of conveying the instability of the environment that the blind witness, which is foreign to sighted people. According to me, it reaches that step of compassion rather than a feeling of frustration.

 

But what about experiences where people are put in situations that they are not comfortable with?

 

Will health care providers, whose biases against a woman who has an abortion that affects the level of care they provide, be able to respect a woman’s choices through merely a VR experience?

 

That is a very specific question, isn’t it? And seems like a tough nut to crack. Luckily, it is my nut to crack as this is exactly what I am working on and the reason I say luckily is because it has been an absolute delight designing an experience around such a challenging topic.

 

Before I started making any design decisions, it was important listing out the barriers this experience would face :

 

• It is difficult for health care providers to step into the shoes of someone who is a patient (an outgroup character). People define themselves in terms of social groupings. Others who share the same qualities as them are ingroup and those who do not are outgroup.

• The revelation about the woman’s abortion could make them unreceptive to the rest of the experience and they can shut themselves off completely.

• It was important that the health care providers would feel a connection with the character (woman) to care enough to listen to her story without breaking the immersion.

So how does one go about solving a challenge like this?

The solution to this problem can very well translate to other topics like Biases against Homosexuals or Biases against Race and one can create a framework out of it.

 

 Let us talk about Experience-taking

The immersive phenomenon of simulating the mindset and persona of a protagonist is what we refer to as experience-taking.
 

Through experience-taking, readers let go of key components of their identities and assume the identity of the character, adopting the character’s thoughts, emotions, goals, traits, and actions and experiencing the narrative as though they were that character while remaining immersed in the world of narrative [1].
 

It is suggested that each person belonging to the same caste/race/nationality/gender/sexual orientation may have a similar understanding of these aggregates and we see a part of ourselves in those people that we share these traits with. Biases also crop up when people are on the opposite sides of a job spectrum; Police officer and civilians, board members and employees, doctor and patient, salesperson and customers. So people are more biased towards a person from their own field as opposed to someone from a different field. These biases are most often one’s subconscious tendency to favor one’s own. This makes it difficult for a person to step into the “others” shoes.

 

The basic structure of our experience is as follows:

• You are present in a room with multiple personal objects.

• When a player picks up one of them, they hear a first-person recollection of a past event from the woman's life.

• At some point, the character will mention she had an abortion and hopefully, by this point, the playtester has learned enough about her to not be biased (or be less biased) against her.

Here are some of the tested hypotheses from Geoff Kaufman’s research on experience-taking. Studies were conducted by asking participants to read stories and then fill out a survey on it. I will not be going into the details of why the validated hypotheses stand true as Geoff does an exceptional job of explaining it in his paper. I will instead talk about how these were implemented in the experience using VR.

 

• Self-concept Accessibility

Hypothesis : The researchers predicted that those who chronically tend to focus on their own self-concept, as indexed by high private self-consciousness, should enter a story world with a higher baseline level of self-concept accessibility and, thus, be less likely to simulate the experience of the story’s Protagonist.

Conclusion : Lower self-concept accessibility leads to a higher level of experience-taking [1].

Our Experience : For this purpose, we are going to tell the participants that this experience is to assess the impact on health care providers in general and that they represent an average health care provider no matter what their background or major is. They will not be asked for any identifying information and will be assigned an arbitrary number for the session.

 

• Narrative Voice (First-person or Third-person)

Hypothesis : The researchers expected that first-person narratives, by virtue of creating a more immediate sense of closeness and familiarity to the main character, would be more conducive to experience-taking than would third-person narratives, which explicitly position protagonists as separate entities (and, in our view, are more likely to position readers as spectators).

Conclusion : The first-person narrative evokes a higher level of experience-taking [1].

Our Experience : When you enter the experience, you hear a message where the protagonist’s parents talk about selling the childhood home that she grew up in. They ask her to gather her keepsakes and say her goodbyes.  You start in a room that is unfamiliar to the player. By the looks of it, it must be the woman's living room. Considering there is an empty box in front of you and interactive keepsakes around it, it seems like it's up to you to pack all those sacred mementoes full of good and bad (a reminder of mistakes and lessons learned) memories from the past. As you pick up those objects, a voice-over takes you down a memory lane. You get to learn about the people in the woman’s life, her location and maturity at the time, and the memory associated with it in her reminiscence. Bear in mind, no information about her past abortion is disclosed yet.

 

The objects were selected carefully such that most of our target audience should have had interacted with or seen those objects at some point in their life.

 

The list of keepsakes is as follows: Polaroid Camera, Magic Wand, Diary/Planner, torn Teddy Bear stitched by her sister and her, Snow Globe, Pocket Watch, Puppy Coin bank, Vinyl Recorder, Music box, child’s drawing.

 

The protagonist uses a first-person narrative to describe the memories associated with the keepsakes as the players interact with them. Since the protagonist is feeling nostalgic as she rides down the memory lane, we wish for the player to resonate with this feeling alongside.

It also helps that VR is a more immersive platform for experiencing first-person narratives than any other traditional platforms.

We realised that first-person narrative independently was not enough to elicit a higher level of experience-taking.

 

• Group Membership between Reader and Character (Ingroup or Outgroup)

Hypothesis : The researchers predicted that a story written in first-person voice that depicts a character who shares a relevant group membership with readers would most effectively bridge the psychological gap between the reader and the character by establishing a foundation of immediate familiarity and assumed similarity(e.g., in terms of daily life experiences) that would make it easier for readers to simulate the character’s experience.

Conclusion : A first-person version of the narrative that featured a protagonist who shared an ingroup membership with participants would elicit a higher level of experience-taking than all other versions of the narrative. The impact can still be evident in participants’ behaviour several days afterwards. [1]

Our Experience : When we share memories from the past, may it be a funny, an embarrassing story or a struggle, we share feelings of happiness or recognition of the difficulties we overcome and this helps us understand one another better. Talking about our own past helps build an identity based on how we feel about the events in our past and what they mean to us. As the protagonist shares her memory, we are allowing the player to build a persona for the protagonist. This allows the player into believing the idea of "she is no different from me", thus enabling the player to establish a connection with her. The sharing of these memories makes the player more open to absorbing information about the woman.

 

The feeling of nostalgia may not be enough to make the player identify an in-group relationship with the protagonist. To overcome this limitation, the revealing of information about her abortion is delayed which would allow players to experientially merge with an outgroup member.

 

Two important things that I would like to point out :

1. Using just VR does not evoke empathy: The design process suggests a combination of VR and experience-taking. This allows the player to enter the experience in a cognitive (I understand what you’re feeling) or an emotional state (I feel what you’re feeling). The process changes from experience-taking to perspective-taking when you experience it in a cognitive state but the impact remains the same. In an emotional state, you let go of your identity completely whereas in a cognitive state, you maintain your identity and develop feelings on top of that maintained identity.

2. Take the player on a journey of overcoming struggles: A VR experience should not end after making the player feel the emotions of another person leading to personal distress as a response to another’s plight. Players will not feel compassionate at the sight of the protagonist giving up but only disconnected and bothered once they leave the experience. Instead, compassion is a result of sensing optimism despite the struggles. We do this in our experience by showing that she became a strong independent woman after going through her journey of abortion.

 

I think that using VR along with a combination of techniques like experience-taking is a powerful approach to eliciting emotions in our players. So the next time you want to create an experience in VR that needs to have a meaningful impact, I encourage you to research about techniques used in psychology that can use the power of VR to deliver the emotions you wish to convey. If the emotion you wish to convey is empathy, remember to not let the players come out of the experience feeling anxious. Take them one step forward to reach that state of compassion.

 

If you wish to discuss more on this topic, you can contact me at tsurve@andrew.cmu.edu.