Although it mostly started with gaming, VR has evolved into so many different dimensions and has taken several industries to the next level. Being one of the technologies with the highest projected potential for growth, VR has started to take its rightful place within the education, medicine, and creative industry and the unique experience it can offer in each of these areas and others could help us create the future we want to see. As the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg once said, “Virtual reality was once a dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream, and so were computers and smartphones. The future is coming”. This is a powerful quote, to which the VR which allows such immersive experiences is testament to.
The VR experience is a powerful tool that can help today’s society to reconnect with their humanity in various aspects using strong empathetic feelings, and so inspire the world to works towards a better tomorrow.
The Empathy Experiment
In our project, we tried to create an environment where the users can choose where they want to get vaccinated or not. Since the setting of the story is 2030, and the world is in collapse as there are no effective vaccines, we tried to replicate that in our waiting rooms by making them smaller (to make the users feel trapped and hopeless ) and the voiceover instructions (we used an AI voice generator). In the world of collapse, everyone is in deep stress, and there is a lack of trust, fear, uncertainty, and, most importantly, a feeling of terror caused by the downfall of medicine. So, with the waiting rooms and the VR videos created by my group and the other teams, we wanted to ignite the feeling of empathy in each character as they experience each characters’ journey.
By accepting to go ahead with the decision to enter the world of collapse, the users will be transported to another room to see a glimpse of what each decision leads to within Collapse 2030. We hope that this will create a question and feeling of uncertainty for the users as they try to contemplate what they want to do (in terms of getting the vaccine and how). Additionally, we wanted them to feel the weight of making a big decision like this one, so we expected the users to feel scared, afraid, and alone as they try to make this big decision.
The Question: How do you feel?
Our project was made to be tested with age groups of 16 years and above, as they are the ones eligible for the Covid- 19 vaccine. They found the experience to be “relatable” and “reflective”, since we are in a time where the possibilities we show in our experience, might actually occur due to the ongoing pandemic. However, they also found the overall experience a bit too instructive as they were guided every step of the way while maybe letting them figure out some things by themselves would have given them more agency and made their experience more fun. Moreover, our users also felt a bit confused by the doors in the waiting room area and had a hard time remembering which door led to which story, which could have been solved by simply labeling the doors to make their experience much easier.
The making of…
To help our users find their way around our waiting room and make it to their journeys, we made some slight changes to the doors after the user tests and added labels on top of them. Door 1: Cheap yet accessible vaccine, Door 2: Life with no vaccine, Door 3: Paid to be experimented on
Before
After
What is next?
We created this project in Unity 3D as part of the final project, and we learned a lot in the process of making the project come to life. We also tested this experience to more than 5+ people. Through this creativity, we learned that the users’ comfortability is the most crucial aspect of VR. We learned that, though, as we filmed our 360 films where the camera is moving. This created a lot of dizziness and discomfort for the users. Therefore, moving forward, we would like to avoid moving the camera while filming, and create another modified project and experiment with the collision of 360 videos + animation based Collapse 2020 project as we hope to create a more immersive and empathic experience.