Apple has begun selling its Vision Pro virtual reality (VR) goggles. Like other goggles in the newly expanding VR market, its technology can help users experience three-dimensional (3D) immersive films that allow them literally hear and see events from other people’s points of view (POV). Research suggests such films could help make the goggles a kind of “empathy machine” to increase users’ understanding of marginalized people’s life experiences, including LGBTQ+ folks.
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The 2023 VR film Body of Mine allowed viewers to inhabit the body of someone grappling with gender dysphoria. The LGBTQ+ VR Museum, unveiled in 2022, allows viewers to hold 3D personal objects while hearing their owners’ emotional histories. The 2019 animated documentary and VR game _Another Dream immerses viewers in the true love story of an Egyptian lesbian couple escaping anti-LGBTQ+ persecution. The 2018 VR film Queerskins lets viewers observe two parents coming to terms with their son’s HIV-related death. Google’s 2016 #PrideForEveryone video project gives viewers 360-degree views of live-action Pride parades in five cities around the world.
All of these projects vary in how they show queer people’s experiences. Body of Mine, for example, viewers are deliberately given a virtual body that is different from their own and can explore a CGI animated fantasy world. Queerskins mixes live actors into virtual CGI settings and allows viewers to change what happens depending on the objects they virtually interact with. The #PrideForEveryone video only shows viewers real-life parade footage without allowing them to interact.
If these projects are any indication, the number of LGBTQ+-related VR films is only likely to increase in the coming years, especially as the goggle’s technology allows users to start recording panoramic content from their own first-person POV.
Several studies have shown that VR films can increase viewer’s “emotional empathy” with marginalized groups. That is, the technology can positively impact viewers’ emotional understanding of other people’s lived experiences. Such empathy can have “pro-social” effects, changing people’s feelings towards marginalized groups and making them more likely to support these groups in real life.
But psychological studies on VR films and empathy are relatively new, and researchers are unsure which film formats are most effective at boosting empathy, how long-term the empathy effects last, whether such films can backfire and actually traumatize viewers into being anti-social and make them less likely to engage with marginalized communities, or if the films positively affect viewers’ “cognitive empathy” — that is, their complex ability to rationally understand someone’s perspective without observing their emotional experiences.
Some researchers worry that the claim of VR goggles and films being an “empathy machine” is just a lot of marketing hype meant to sell expensive technology without considering its long-term effects on users, such as eye strain, nausea, and fatigue (sometimes called “cyber-sickness”), impaired depth-perception and hand-eye coordination or even visual hallucinations and a gradually distorted worldview that views real-life people as virtual “un-humans” and “non-playable characters” in “a gamified, uncanny valley.”
One review of VR empathy studies concluded that immersive VR films might best affect viewers’ empathy when accompanied and contextualized with information and real-life engagements with marginalized people and their circumstances, like encouraging people to role-play as marginalized people or experience their lived hardships. Researchers conclude that this could create “a more harmonious space for embracing salient resonances and emotions.”
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