I recently got back in contact with an old friend from high school named Dixon, whose path in life has greatly diverged from mine. This is not a bad or good thing; it’s just to say that it had been a long time since we had found the time to talk, much less a reason, so it was great to catch up. They let me know what they were doing (getting back on their feet after a rocky year) and I let their know what I was doing (same), and there was a great deal of empathy for each other found in this hour and a half it took to recap our lives. It was nice.
A little after this, Dixon sent me an unexpected email about my last post, Horsepocalypse. It seems that the requirements that I felt were essential to a good mixed reality experience were actually the very feelings that one would have during a strong hallucinatory experience. This was, frankly, something I had never thought of; I’ve rarely ever experienced my own hallucinations, and have never taken a hallucinogen to get there (as far as I knew)[1]More a product of environment, not my moral inclinations.. Dixon, on the other hand, has been experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations since a young age. Though it never really interfered with their life, they realized as they got older that these kinds of experiences brought with them a certain social stigma. This realization brought anxiety, and they began to think of their brain as less quirky and more… broken, for lack of a better word. This anxiety just made their symptoms worse.
But Dixon recently decided to work and change this perspective, for themselves and for others. They experimented with hallucinogens as a method of control, being active in a vision’s formation instead of a passive player. Choosing to hallucinate brought a sense of openness to the task, and made it a healthier experience. Hallucinating with others, close friends that didn’t have this mental quirk, also brought healing, this time through empathy. In their words:
…after that experience it seemed like they understood my experiences of hallucinations a little better – we’d all spent ~6 hours feeding off each others hallucinations and our own, seen how suggestible our minds were to turning words or thoughts into acute visual/auditory experiences. now when i express my experiences of hallucinations it doesn’t feel like i’m crazy because they’ve had something similar happen.
This led Dixon to the point of their email: in many important ways, virtual and mixed reality are just another form of hallucination, but one that “you can take off when you need to”[2]Again, their words. It was a beautiful email.. Virtual reality gives one the ability to manipulate the space around them in such a visceral way… but that manipulation is still contained in the mind of the user, just as a hallucination.
Here, Dixon hit on something crucially important in the future of virtual and mixed reality: using it as a path to a more connected society, for building empathy. Video games are fun, and an obvious application for something so graphics-heavy, but much of the software being developed can’t be called a game; it’s more of an experience. This immersion factor has the ability to open a VR user to a completely new side of their own reality. For instance, I would love to see a VR/MR experience that allows one to realize what it’s like living with quirks of the mind that… aren’t necessarily quirks to other people, like synesthesia. Having several parties interacting in the same space, with the same “quirk” running through their headsets, is where VR would truly shine. It would bring a human perspective that textbook learning could never provide.
Suprisingly (to me), Dixon’s message is the first time someone outside of the tech bubble[3]in which I am comfortably nestled has posed these things to me. At trade shows and conferences, most people I talk to just want a better way to tour a house, or put virtual ads up in malls. At its most enlightened, VR is discussed as a training and learning tool, but for more mechanical modes of learning, e.g. putting out electrical fires or repairing a car engine. I’m not saying that these things aren’t useful; they’re practically screaming to be developed, and that business is ripe for the building. But bringing a human element into the experience, and making it a tool for connectivity, is why this budding technology is going to be so, incredibly powerful.
However, I do fear when this immersion could be taken too far. Would there be value in a VR simulation that puts the user in the place of a rape victim, for instance? Would there be a proper way to expose this experience to others, or is it strictly out-of-bounds, given no one should ever experience such a thing in the first place? The cognitive dissonance might be too much, and in fact might prevent the connections that were desired from forming at all. It’s an extreme example, but VR experiences are so visceral that, like a bad trip, it could leave one scarred. I do not know the demarcation here, nor could I hope to define one; probably, like pornography, one would know it when they see it.
What of those who aren’t easily able to empathize, like someone on the autism spectrum? Could VR be used to expose them to another’s feelings, and thus internalize those feelings as their own? Or would it just become a learning tool, just a way to teach the proper reaction to a certain situation? In my mind, that experience would be equally valuable when flipped on its head, with an autistic lead in a VR experience that forces you to connect as they would connect, to go through a world void of others’ emotion.
Luckily, neither I nor Dixon are the first ones to think of VR in this way. There are all sorts of projects on an academic and theraputic level pursuing this path:
- An article from WIRED magazine exploring this concept can be found here.
- Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is hard at work making these experiences effective in the right way.
- Analysis and explanation of the Machine To Be Another project, which was specifically designed to be a performance piece on VR-based empathy.
- Perspective, Chapter 1: The Party is a short film that actually works with taboo subjects in VR by looking into a night at a frat party from two different perspectives.
Though the technology is fascinating to me, in an academic sense, I always fear what VR could become. I’m not referring to anything sinister here; rather, I’m talking about VR getting shoved into an intellectual corner as the next big gaming platform. I want VR to have meaning, on a human level, and shoot-em-ups aren’t going to do it for me. Dixon’s email and my research following finally bring these abstract thoughts into the forefront of my mind, and concretely define my own hopes for the platform: empathy. I want VR to build empathy. To bring people together. VR gives you the chance to literally see through someone’s eyes, to literally walk a mile in their shoes. This is an awesome ability, in the classical sense of the word; I just hope above all hopes that this ability is harnessed in the right way.
Dixon is a pretty cool person, if I say so myself, and you should bug them about finally trying on a VR headset through their twitter account.