Virtual reality’s new frontier: peacekeeping, Iraq War therapy, and digital paradises
Om takes me on a tour of her daily life in Palestine. I meet her husband and children, ride around in the husband's taxi, watch the kids play on the carousel. I watch Om fold laundry and go through the weary steps of preparing to give birth while dealing with the loss of two of her children in the 2014 airstrikes, when Israeli forces bombedseveral United Nations schools. She meets with a support group of other women who also lost children in the conflict.
I watch her begin and end her day with her family, praying that no one will ever have to experience her own levels of loss and devastation. I’m able to do everything but reach out and touch.
Vrse.works. My Mother’s Wing is a short 360-degree film that recently debuted online and on the Vrse mobile app.
It’s the third of a series of VR films that the UN has commissioned to take viewers into the daily lives of people impacted by the UN’s work. Previous films have introduced viewers to Syrians living in a Jordanian refugee camp and a Liberian Ebola survivor.
The Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) at Stanford, which studies human interactions in immersive environments, has conducted numerous studies illustrating that virtual reality can significantly increase empathic responses in its subjects.
In one study, participants who experienced the simulated experience of being colorblind in a VR environment spent more time helping someone who was actually colorblind after the study ended. In another study, virtually turning people into superheroes made them more likely to help others in real life.
Ana Serrano is the chief digital officer at the Canadian Film Centre. She notes that what we have instead mostly consists of 360-degree films instead of other forms of immersive VR, like the meditation I participated in, or more fully interactive VR.
To accelerate the process of inventing the medium, it would be good to get over the delusion that this is a 360-degree movie screen, so we can take better advantage of the possibilities for active navigation and interactivity," she told me.
The use of VR as a tool for therapy is also expanding. Among Serrano’s projects at the CFC Media Lab is a virtual reality meditation piece that builds on biofeedback from the user to build its interface in real time.
See the full story here: http://www.vox.com/2016/5/10/11651938/virtual-reality-expanding-therapy-art-journalism