Companies everywhere are finally honing in on the immersive power that virtual reality (VR) offers, including in the design, entertainment, education, and retail industries. VR heightens the customer experience, leading to greater engagement and ultimately, a deeper emotional connection with the brand. Taking this to the next level now, are non-profit organisations, who have begun using VR in effective and impactful ways to highlight their causes.
Imagine scrolling online and coming across a news video about a natural disaster that’s just occurred. Maybe a journalist is explaining what has taken place, detailing the devastation, and what is needed to restore the community. Now imagine going into VR to view the same aftermath, but this time standing on the front lawn in front of what used to be a family home. Houses are in ruins; cars have been tossed; trees ripped out by the roots. It’s a different experience, isn’t it?
VR takes you there. It gives you an insider’s perspective, and makes the experience your viewing, yours. This emotional bond to a story, this prompted empathy, that VR has the potential to forge makes it the ideal engagement tool for non-profit organisations. VR is raising awareness to causes often overlooked, and in turn, has become a new kind of revenue-generating tool for a new era.
Attendants at a 2016 fundraiser gala hosted by charity: water were shown a VR film entitled The Source which takes place around a rural Ethiopian village. The film follows Selam, a 13-year-old girl who’s tasked with going on the long trek to fetch water for her family’s use. The journey alone is memorable, due to its length and remoteness, but then we see up close the unhygienic state of the water source from which she’s fetching. VR ensures viewers get a very real sense of the conditions Selam’s family lives in, where she goes to school, and what her daily chores are. After a group of aid workers installs a clean-water well, we see the hope and enthusiasm this addition brings the community. We discern the impact it will have on the lives of those who live there. The charity: water gala raised over $2.4 million (USD), which far exceeded expectations.
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has often used non-traditional (sometimes confrontational) means to tell their story and draw attention to their cause. Their use of VR has generated a great deal of conversation. One video is shot from the perspective of a chicken on a factory farm. Another piece of VR content takes viewers into the concrete orca tanks at SeaWorld. The material is graphic and will likely make you feel uncomfortable, and that’s the point. The emotional reactions VR prompts – like life – aren’t always happy.
Made in partnership with the United Nations, Clouds Over Sidra is a 2015 VR film that highlights the refugee crisis in Syria, as narrated by a 12-year-old girl in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. The film depicts the daily lives of the people who live in the camp, who’ve fled their home country merely to survive. It’s the first film shot in VR for the UN, leveraging the medium to tell the important stories of this vulnerable population, and generate greater awareness of their cause.
VR is the difference between watching something happen from the outside, and nearly experiencing it for yourself. Currently, there is an estimated 171 million VR users worldwide – a number that’s growing every day. 81% of people who try VR tell others about it, because it is a storytelling medium and we are storytellers at heart. The onslaught of the technology for marketing purposes may still be relatively new. But as long as VR continues to generate an emotional (sometimes uncomfortable) reaction in viewers, we’ll see non-profit organisations leveraging the medium to tell their stories in impactful ways.
Filmmaker Taura Musgrove saw The Last Goodbye , a virtual reality (VR) documentary led by Gabo Arora by Lightshed. The documentary followed Pinchas Gutter, a Holocaust survivor and takes the user to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. With the help of room-scale VR, the experience takes the viewer on a tour of the camp and Pincha’s experience as a child there. The compassion and empathy felt by viewers is what Musgrove wanted to tap into when she created her augmented reality (AR) experience. Gabo Arora tells VRFocusabout how with his guidance Musgrove and John Hopkins University were able to create an app that could bring the new youths in touch with their historical past in Baltimore.
Freedom Fighter is an AR app built with Apple’s ARkit that uses geofencing to bring users face-to-face with a volumetric AR model of American Civil Rights leader Dr. Lillie May Carroll Jackson. The app works only with geofencing, meaning that users can only access the content in the exact physical space where the content is made to be displayed. A little like Pokemon Go, you have to physically walk to a location to get access to certain items. Musgrove hopes that Freedom Fighter will not only connect Baltimorians with the history of their city, street corners and significant historical figures but also also show them where certain events took place with geofencing.
So if you were to download the app on an iPhone, you would physically have to walk to certain street corners in Baltimore and take out your iphone. All these locations you have to walk to, are of historical significance in the history of Baltimore and have been affected by the riots in 2015 or are in urban decay. You would hold up your phone for example and see the old National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) appear as well as an AR model of Dr. Jackson. She would then proceed to tell you about herself, the history of this corner and its significance.
Dr. Lillie May Carroll Jackson is a herald of American Civil Rights. As head of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for thirty-five years, she pioneered the organization of ordinary citizens, black and white, to protest lynching, educational segregation, and police brutality. Arora, the executive producer of Freedom Fighter explains that Baltimore suffered riots in 2015, the origin of the Black Lives Matter movement and a hotbed of activism and solutions for racial and social justice. The younger generation however seem to have forgotten Baltimore’s civil rights activists and the importance of certain locations in the history of America.
The app has not been released yet, but when it is, it will be completely free to download. making it accessible to let viewers experience firsthand Dr. Jackson’s leadership, vision and strategy for activism. Arora talks about potentially bringing this into history classes in Baltimore as well as helping sustain black businesses in the community by collecting points through the app. To find out more watch the video below.
Gabo Arora founded the United Nations VR, and has directed some of the more well-known VR empathy experiences starting with Clouds Over Sidra in December 2014 in collaboration with Chris Milk’s VR production house Within. Milk first showed Clouds Over Sidra during Sundance 2015, and featured it prominently in his VR as the Ultimate Empathy Machine TED talk in March 2015, which popularized VR’s unique abilities for cultivating empathy.
I had a chance to catch up with Arora at Oculus’ VR for Good premiere party at Sundance where we talked about producing Clouds Over Sidra, his new Lightshed production company, and the importance of storytelling in creating VR empathy experiences.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Arora’s work has been at cross section of storytelling and technology, and diplomacy and humanitarian efforts. He studied film in college, but was unable to launch a successful film career in Hollywood, and instead turned towards humanitarian work with NGOs after 9/11 and eventually with the United Nations in 2009. He used his creative sensibilities to move beyond written text reports, and look to the power of new media to tell humanitarian stories. He had some success with collaborating with social media sensation Humans of New York photographer Brandon Stanton by coordinating a 50-day global trip with in 2014 in order to raise awareness of millennium development goals. He proved the power of using emerging technology to promote humanitarian goals.
After he was introduced to Within’s Chris Milk in 2014, he gathered enough support to create a virtual reality lab at UN staring with creating an experience about the Syrian refugee crisis. Clouds Over Sidra was shot in two days in December 2014 at the Za’atari Refugee Camp, which had over 80,000 Syrian refugees. Arora wanted to focus on a day in the life of a 12-year old refugee, and collaborated with his UN contacts to find the young female protagonist named Sidra. Arora said that a big key to cultivating empathy in virtual reality is to focus on the common ordinary aspects of day-to-day living whether that’s eating a meal or preparing for school. While some of these scenes would seem like non-sequiturs in a 2D film, the sense of presence that’s cultivated in VR gives the feeling of being transported into their world and a feeling of being more connected to the place and story.
Arora acknowledges that merely showing suffering of others can have the opposite effect of cultivating empathy. He cites Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others as a book that helped provide some guidelines for how to represent the pain of others. He’s aware that we can have a lustful relationship towards violence, and that there are risks of normalizing suffering can create an overwhelming sensory overload. He’s addresses some of Paul Bloom’s arguments in Against Empathy in that there’s a bias towards empathizing with people who look or act like you. If there’s too much of a difference, then it can be difficult to connect through on any common ground. This is a big reason why Arora has typically focused on finding ways of representing the moments of common humanity within the larger context of fleeing from war or coping with a spreading disease like Ebola.
Arora was able to show that Clouds Over Sidra was able to help the United Nations beat their projected fundraising goal of $2.3 billion dollars by raising over $3.8 billion, but he’s much more confident in showing the UNICEF’s numbers of being able to double face-to-face donations from 1 in 12 without VR to 1 in 6 with VR with an increase of 10% per donation. With these types of numbers, there’s been a bit of a gold rush for NGOs to start making VR experiences for a wide range of causes, but Arora cautions that not all have been successful because not all of them have had an emphasis on good storytelling or the technical expertise that he’s enjoyed with his collaborations with Within.
Hamlet on the Holodeck author Janet H. Murray recently echoed the importance of good storytelling in VR experiences by saying that “empathy in great literature or journalism comes from well-chosen and highly specific stories, insightful interpretation, and strong compositional skills within a mature medium of communication. A VR headset is not a mature medium — it is only a platform, and an unstable and uncomfortable one at that.” The storytelling conventions of VR are still emerging, and the early VR empathy pieces have been largely relying upon conventions of traditional filmmaking.
Arora admits that there’s a certain formulaic structure that most of these early VR empathy pieces have taken that rely upon voice over narration, but he says that he started to dial back the voice overs in his most recent piece The Ground Beneath Her. He says that his recent collaboration with Milk on the U2 Song for Someone music video showed him that there’s a lot that can be communicated without resorting to voice overs.
Murray argues that “VR is not a film to be watched but a virtual space to be visited and navigated through,” and she actually recommends “no voice-overs, no text overlays, no background music.” I’ve independently come to the same conclusion, and generally agree with this sentiment because most voice over narrations or translations feel scripted and stilted. They are also often recorded within a studio that doesn’t match the direct and reflected sounds of the physical locations that are shown, which creates a fidelity mismatch that can break presence and prevent me from feeling completely immersed within the soundscapes of another place.
I’ve found that the cinéma vérité approach of having authentic dialog spoken directly within a scene works really well, or that it works best if the audio is directing me to pay attention to specific aspects to the physical locations that are being shown. After watching all ten of the Oculus for Good pieces at Sundance, one of the most common things that I saw is not having the physical location match whatever is being talked about. Sometimes they’re interesting locations to look at, but it ends up putting the majority of storytelling responsibility within the audio. If the audio were to be taken away, then the visual storytelling isn’t strong enough to stand on it’s own.
6×9’s Francesca Panetta used audio tour guides as an inspiration for how to use audio in order to cultivate a deeper sense of presence within the physical location being shown. One live-action VR piece that does this really well was a cinéma vérité piece by Condition One called Fierce Compassion, which features an animal rights activist speaking on camera taking you on a guided tour through an open rescue as it’s happening. The live delivery of narration feels much more dynamic when it’s spoken within the moment, and feels much more satisfying than a scripted narration that’s written and recorded after the fact.
A challenging limitation to many NGO empathy pieces is that they often feature non-English speakers who need to be translated later by a translator who doesn’t always match the emotional authenticity and dynamic speaking style of the original speaker. Emotional authenticity and capturing a live performance are some key elements of what I’ve found makes a live-action VR experience so captivating, but it’s been rare to find that in VR productions so far. There are often big constraints of limited time and budgets, which means that most of them end up featuring voice over narratives after the fact since this is the easiest way of telling a more sophisticated story. This formula has proven to be successful for Arora’s empathy pieces so far, but it still feels like a hybrid between traditional filmmaking techniques and what virtual reality experiences will eventually move towards, which I think Murray quite presciently lays out in her piece about emerging immersive storyforms.
Arora’s work with the UN in collaboration with Within has inspired everyone from the New York Times VR to Oculus’s VR for Good program and HTC’s VR for Impact. It also inspired Chris Milk’s TED talk about VR as the “ultimate empathy machine”, which is a meme that has been cited on the Voices of VR podcast dozens of times.
But the film medium is also a powerful empathy machine as Arora cites Moonlight as a particularly powerful empathy piece that was released in 2016. Roger Ebert actually cited movies as the “most powerful empathy machine” during his Walk of Fame speech in 2005. He said:
We are born into a box of space and time. We are who and when and what we are and we’re going to be that person until we die. But if we remain only that person, we will never grow and we will never change and things will never get better.
Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else’s life for a while. I can walk in somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.
This is a liberalizing influence on me. It gives me a broader mind. It helps me to join my family of men and women on this planet. It helps me to identify with them, so I’m not just stuck being myself, day after day.
The great movies enlarge us, they civilize us, they make us more decent people.
Ebert’s words about film as a powerful empathy machine as just as true today as when he said it in 2005. I do believe that virtual reality has the power to create an even deeper sense of embodied presence that can trigger mirror neurons, and may eventually prove to become the “ultimate empathy machine.” VR may also eventually allow us to virtually walk in someone else’s shoes to the point where our brains may not be able to tell the difference between what’s reality and what’s a simulation. But as Murray warns, “empathy is not something that automatically happens when a user puts on a headset.” It’s something that is accomplished through evolving narrative techniques to take full advantage of the unique affordances of VR, and at the end of the day will come down to good storytelling just like any other medium.
Imagine scrolling online and coming across a news video about a natural disaster that’s just occurred. Maybe a journalist is explaining what has taken place, detailing the devastation, and what is needed to restore the community. Now imagine going into VR to view the same aftermath, but this time standing on the front lawn in front of what used to be a family home. Houses are in ruins; cars have been tossed; trees ripped out by the roots. It’s a different experience, isn’t it?
