Introduction to Virtual Reality
Virtual reality can transport people, through headsets and joysticks, into immersive, imaginary worlds where they will explore alien planets, battle zombies, and even play minigolf. However, Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri isn’t a lot concerned with the emerging technology’s ability to create fantastical worlds for gamers as she is in its supposed promise to assist us higher understand, and thereby improve, our own.
The Promise of Virtual Reality
In her latest book, “In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles” (Duke University Press), Messeri examines a community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, artists, and tech innovators focused on using virtual reality (VR) to treatment societal ills by generating empathy toward marginalized communities. However, technology alone can’t solve complex social problems, Messeri explains, whilst such fantasies nonetheless persist.
Understanding Fractured Realities
When Messeri began this project, she got slightly nervous since it seemed as if, given the subject of virtual reality, she’d need to say something concerning the nature of reality, which appeared like a frightening task given millennia of humans pondering this query. She began twiddling with the term “unreal,” versus the true. The point was to be very clear that the unreal shouldn’t be reality’s opposite. Rather, what the unreal signals is a moment when reality’s multiplicity demands attention. The reality one person experiences is different from the fact one other person experiences, which is different from the fact of somebody in a war-torn country.
Virtual Reality as an Empathy Machine
Messeri was observing innovators and storytellers who were concerned with using VR to inform impactful stories concerning the world, often from the angle of individuals with identities or from communities which were historically marginalized, with the goal of inducing a powerful, empathetic response. For example, within the introduction she describes experiencing “Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible),” a VR project written and directed by Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu that places the viewer amongst a bunch of migrants crossing the Mexican border into the United States.
The VR Community in Los Angeles
People in LA were using VR as a documentary, non-fictional storytelling device that might bridge differences and (it was imagined) allow people of privilege to enter the worlds of those with less privilege, which might in turn cultivate empathy, create a greater world, etc. As a scholar trained to think critically about science and technology, particularly when social goods are being promised, Messeri was immediately apprehensive and interested by this concept. Los Angeles was where plenty of this sort of work was happening.
Embedding with a Start-up
Messeri worked with a complete bunch of firms and communities, including on the University of Southern California, the Technicolor Experience Center, and with several start-ups and other endeavors. Carrie Shaw invited her into her company, Embodied Labs, which was using virtual reality as a tool for helping caregivers higher understand the experiences that their elderly clients were enduring, reminiscent of problems that arise with our minds and bodies as we age.
What Distinguishes Embodied Labs
In the tip, what Messeri felt distinguished Embodied Labs from other start-ups on this space is that it was using VR as a tool to help or augment the work of individuals working as caregivers, which has the potential to learn each parties in an existing social relationship. These were caregivers who’re quite aware of the experiences of their elderly clients. And that’s very different than instances when VR is getting used to switch the necessity to have interaction with other humans.
Conclusion
It’s not inconceivable that VR could possibly be a tool that further helps inform us about things happening on the earth. But the concept it will probably by some means, by itself, fix societal problems represents a mindset that too often accompanies emerging technologies. VR shouldn’t be only an emerging technology, but additionally a cinematic technology used to inform stories. This distinction allows us to think about the potential for VR as a cinematic technology for use for telling engaging and impactful stories, but VR in and of itself shouldn’t be going to repair the world.
