pitch – Cyborgs and Virtual Worlds

Evoking Empathy Abstract

Empathy is something that we learn over time with every choice we make. People often make empathetic responses to each other online, but some say that empathy has been declining in young people since we started using technology-based communication. Technology can also be what inspires empathy within young people. There was a study where over a thousand young adults were provided with a questionnaire that provided them with questions that asked about their daily use of media, real-world empathy, virtual empathy, social support, and demographic information. The results had shown that people ended up spending more face-to-face time due to virtual technology. Virtual has been often to teach empathy within young people. There are many Virtual Reality applications that evoke empathy within young people.

For example, Jeremy Bailenson and his team ran a research project called “Empathy at Scale” that explored ways to design, test, and distribute virtual reality projects that help to teach empathy. The project put people in the perspectives of who the subjects were to better empathize with. The results were astonishing. Subjects who were viewing the perspective of a color-blind person were found to be twice as likely to help a color-blind person in real life.

Another example would be when the film producer Chris Milk had worked with the United Nations to create a virtual reality film called Clouds Over Sidra. In the film, you are inside a Syrian refugee camp and you will be shadowing the life of a 12-year-old girl named Sidra. She had been living there for over 18 months along with thousands of other refugees. While wearing the Oculus Rift, those watching the movies able to look around see children staring back at them. This made for a more empathetic experience.

I would like to create a choice-based adventure game. You are put into a virtual world where you can interact with objects and people. Soon you will be struck with radioactive lightning that changes your outward appearance to be disfigured and hideous. You will have to live out your life looking like a deformed monster. You will be given dialogue options and what you choose will determine how people will perceive you, a human or a monster.

Sources:

Carrier, Mark. “Virtual Empathy: Positive and Negative Impacts of Going Online upon Empathy in Young Adults.” NeuroImage, Academic Press, 10 June 2015, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215003970

Alsever, Jennifer. “Is Virtual Reality the Ultimate Empathy Machine?” Wired, Conde Nast, 10 Nov. 2015, www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/11/is-virtual-reality-the-ultimate-empathy-machine/.

Frankenstein VR Abstract

As a child, I was captivated by a book series commonly referred to as “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. I read and reread these stories trying to uncover each of the unique endings, or at least as many as I could. I would spend hours living the same adventure over and over, seeing how I could make it differ. The VR experience I would like to implement capitalizes on this interest in discovering the unknown based on one’s reactions in certain situations, or moral crises. While I spent hours pouring over old books, the new generation of students have the ability to become that much more captivated by a story that has lasted over 200 years- Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is a perfect avenue to teach empathy especially when combined with the mechanics of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. It calls into question the actions of the user, and can be programed to trigger more empathetic responses. By rewarding empathy at a young age, we can bring up a generation that is more caring to their neighbors. Virtual reality is often coined “the ultimate empathy machine” and will be the best avenue to bring a VR experience based on a timeless book to life (Herrera, Bailenson, Weisz, Ogle, & Zaki 2018).

Frankenstein VR is a completely immersive Virtual Reality application that allows the user to make choices based on their own empathetic levels. With continued use past the VR headset, and with the development of a user friendly smartphone app, Frankenstein VR can easily transcend and persist in our society. By making the app an engaging and unique experience with a whole cast of characters right out of everyone’s favorite Gothic novels, empathy can be taught to everyone in society with smartphone access, and therefore become a forethought in our daily lives.

Citations:

Herrera, Fernanda, et al. “Building Long-Term Empathy: A Large-Scale Comparison of Traditional and Virtual Reality Perspective-Taking.” Plos One, vol. 13, no. 10, 2018, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0204494.

Destination Forge

In the prompt of creating a virtual experience based off of Frankenstein, and an idea that teaches empathy, I formed the idea “Destination Forge”. Destination Forge is an educational, pro-social, adventure-strategy Virtual Reality (VR) experience that combines the story of Frankenstein and the importance of empathy, with a personalized experience of finding one’s true identity.

In the beginning of the experience, participants will have the option to customize their character and decide their occupation, character traits, and voice. Throughout the experience, the participants will be required to complete quests, and based on their responses to various NPC’s and approaches to each quest, a clone of their character will start to form. Based on the amount of empathetic choices a participant makes at the end of formation, their character and it’s clone will either merge to form a powerful mega-human, which will go on to complete quests that encourage empathy, or ultimately will be cursed forever, unless a journey to the “Mirror of Empathy” is made to renew themselves.

The character options will be limited, because the purpose of the game is more important than the number of hair styles available. The body of the characters will be close to the models used in SecondLife, or the role-play game IMVU. Voice acting will also be limited, but occupations will vary.

The target audience for this virtual reality experience is middle and high-school students, based on the understanding of empathy that is required to participate in the virtual experience. The purpose of Destination Forge is to teach students empathy and ultimately believe that empathy is a super-human ability. In a study conducted by Christine M. Bachen et al., pro-social games have been found to “increase empathy and decrease schadenfreude, or pleasure taken at another’s misfortunes.” (Bachen).

The environment for this virtual experience can be chosen: the city, the country, or the work place. Donghee Shin concludes that “stimulated empathy in VR can increase a user’s overall empathy and the perception that a virtual environment is realistic” (Shin). In Destination Forge, the environments and quests are realistic, which will ultimately lead to a more effective impact on a participants life, and level of empathy.

Bachen, M. Christine et al. “How do presence, flow, and character identification affect players’ empathy and interest in learning from a serious computer game?” Computers in Human Behavior, Nov. 2016, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321630471X

Shin, Donghee. “Empathy and embodied experience in virtual environment: To what extent can virtual reality stimulate empathy and embodied experience?” Computers in Human Behavior, Jan. 2018, ezproxy.stevenson.edu:2090/science/article/pii/S0747563217305381

A Day in the Life of a Superhero

A Day in the Life of a Superhero is an educational VR experience meant for children ages 4-10. The goal of the VR game is to teach kids the meaning of empathy at a younger age through the eyes of a superhero, hopefully carrying the message into their daily lives.

To begin this project, I thought about when I was a child and had fictional superhero characters that I looked up to. This got me thinking about heroes that are well recognized but are also outcasted by their citizens, such as Batman, the Hulk or the Incredibles. Batman is a wanted fugitive by the police yet he never kills anyone and only beats-up bad guys. The Hulk is a big, green monster that uncontrollably destroys everything in his wake, and nobody wants him around for it. The Incredibles, at one time, were outlawed if they revealed they had super powers.

After discovering this common theme of the hated superhero, I researched two studies conducted by psychologist Rachel White and other researchers from Stanford University. Their studies were conducted on numerous children roughly between ages 4-10. They had some of the kids dress-up as a superhero while others did not dress-up at all. All of the kids were asked to do long, basic tasks on a computer, allowing them to take as many breaks as they wanted. The studies found that after completing the tasks, the kids who dressed-up were more empathetic towards the researchers than the kids who did not dress-up. Furthermore, the kids in costume completed the computer tasks at a faster rate than the other kids not in costume.

A Day in the Life of a Superhero will attempt to reach young children and bring out more empathy. The players will step into the VR world, modern-day NYC, and will come across a robbery taking place in a tech-store. The players will have to stop the thief. After defeating the thief, the tech-store owner is ungrateful for your help as the player has just destroyed an android prototype that the store was testing as a security system.

Kids are more inclined to empathize with the superhero more-so than the citizens, yet after destroying the tech-store’s property they might feel sorry for what they did. The message A Day in the Life of a Superhero is trying to get across to these kids is if you want to be a superhero and help others, you have to understand how others feel first.

Jarrett, Christian. “Pretending to Be Batman.” The Psychologist, Dec. 2017, web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=4&sid=e1f67a23-0b18-4775-8b2f-163db16f8b8a%40sdc-v-sessmgr04&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=126448371&db=a9h.

Tucker, Patrick. “Virtual Empathy.” Futurist, June 2013, web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=5&sid=e1f67a23-0b18-4775-8b2f-163db16f8b8a%40sdc-v-sessmgr04&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=86889461&anchor=toc.

“In His Undead Shoes” pitch

“In his undead shoes” will be a Virtual Reality cinematic experience that makes the viewer see the world as the creature from the novel “Frankenstein” and go through some key moments of his life.

I would want to use this app to engage people aren’t really into Frankenstein or weren’t really captured by Frankenstein upon the first read. I would like to capture that audience to get them to reevaluate the novel and reframe their view of the novel into the perspective of the creature. Since this will be told through a different medium than the novel, it will hopefully appeal to a different audience than the book while still getting some of the themes across.

This app will use a first person perspective and place the viewer in the shoes of the creature created by Frankenstein. It will include key moments like his birth and rejection from his creator, his learning and observation of society and his exile. We will frame and shoot this in a way where it’s not explicitly known that you are Frankenstein’s monster or that this is the Frankenstein story until the end. When you are exiled, you will find your creator again and he’ll mention that you are an undead abomination he created, wholey unnatural. Then the title will appear “In his undead shoes”.

The whole point of this is to show someone what happens when society rejects you for something you can’t control and how that lack of empathy can shape you. This relies on how Mary Shelley breaks down the fact that “sympathy” is deeply rooted in seeing and visual appeal, and that when a harsh “ugliness” is introduced, society will no longer sympathize (Sympathy, Seeing and Affective Labor, Kyung Sook). Once they experience all the things that the creature experienced, that should hopefully give the audience a more clear link to the creature. We can then open a discussion about the experience, ask how it left people feeling and then reflect on some of the actions of the creature. Open ended questions can be asked like “Why did the creature constantly ask Frankenstein for a wife” and “Why did the creature kill Elizabeth?”. After reflecting on these questions, we can open a discussion about how to prevent something like this or how things like this happen in reality on a smaller, more grounded scale.

Kyung Sook, Shin. Sympathy, Seeing, and Affective Labor: Mary Shelley’s (Re-)Reading of Adam Smith in Frankenstein. 2012, http://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/landing/article.kci?arti_id=ART001680132.

VR Empathy: Inspired by Frankenstein

Using inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in order to develop a empathy evoking virtual reality (VR) program, I have an idea for a VR cinematic experience that puts the user into a world with no explanation. Once in the world they are exposed to a variety of things. The things have not been defined yet, but their intention is to start giving the viewer something to start constructing the world around them. Maybe characters get introduced who start feeding dialogue, or present documents. Maybe some sort of light is turned on, or some sound is heard in the environment. What is presented to the viewer does not immediately answer their questions or concerns, but rather continues to make them ask more questions.

The experience can be used as a method to immerse people into the experiences, and have them feel some sort of connection that evokes empathy. The inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for this comes from the story that the creature tells about his experiences in society (Shelley, pages 75 – 103). In that story the creature spends a lot of time observing and learning about De Lacey’s family. The creature observes the family from a nearby cottage, and in its observations it learns that the family is discriminated against similarly to its on discrimination. It connects with them, and is able to empathize with them without ever actually experiencing empathy towards itself from other humans. That’s an interesting idea to explore within our society and the people who are members of it in 2018. I like the idea of letting a VR user connect dots for themselves, and learn the environment, the subjects, or the character they are embodying.

I am drawing a lot of inspiration from the news stories that the New York Times is using VR for. I believe that is a wonderful use of VR, and a great way to evoke empathy in an audience that has never been exposed to the content they are being immersed to due to VR. I do not have a set scenario to explore yet, but like the New York Times VR experience “The Displaced”, there are a number of stories that need to be told from our fellow humans. I’ve mentioned refugees, but I believe this could be applicable to inner city communities ravaged by gun violence, school communities where the funding is really poor, or areas of the world that have been ravaged by pollution.

Link to Pitch Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UnaDJ67thyuiPyqLmRYvrQfKMMxtah4ByXl_wyEZaQg/edit?usp=sharing

Huck, Jonny, et al. “Designing for Empathy in a Church Community.” Proceedings of the 18th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Media Business, Management, Content & Services, ACM, 2014, pp. 249–251. ACM Digital Library, doi:10.1145/2676467.2676497.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York, Pearson Longman, 2007.

Shin, Donghee. “Empathy and Embodied Experience in Virtual Environment: To What Extent Can Virtual Reality Stimulate Empathy and Embodied Experience?” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 78, Jan. 2018, pp. 64–73. ScienceDirect, doi:10.1016/j.chb.2017.09.012.

Silverstein, Jake. “The Displaced: Introduction.” The New York Times, 5 Nov. 2015. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/magazine/the-displaced-introduction.html.

The Amazing Odyssey

I believe in the power of empathy to positively transform the teacher and student experience in the classroom. If you’ve been in a school for any length of time, you know that whether you’ve asked for it or not, you’re bound to encounter anything. For example, everyday teachers and students are facing difficult/ complex situations in school – questions about belonging and forgiving, advantage and ability, and conflict and acceptance. These are all themes we can find in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. According to Baker et al., “some elementary school children face constant threats to their academic, social, and emotional growth and development. Equally, in meeting the goal of educating and nourishing the whole child. many schools face threats from unacceptably high rates of school violence, bullying, school dropout, youth suicide and other negative behaviors and psychological health” (209).

The purpose of my game is to teach students the story and themes of the novel, Frankenstein. After the students finish playing “The Amazing Odyssey”, they will gain an understanding of the story and themes of Frankenstein, they will learn more about empathy, and in the end, students will learn why the creature was such an empathetic character. The tagline for this game is #buildempathy. “The Amazing Odyssey” is supposed to be a 10 – week designed journey using the Oculus Rift. Win Smith claims that “Integrating the VR experiences with lesson plans could have huge benefits for kids who might not typically retain information from a textbook” (Babcock, Stephen. “This edtech startup is bringing virtual reality to the classroom.” https://technical.ly/baltimore/2015/05/29/alchemy-learning-virtual-reality-classroom-oculus/)

Using the concept of The Amazing Race TV show, the students will have a chance to become the creature and will be given clues that will lead to a scene or narrative passage in the novel, Frankenstein. Where the player has to complete a task with a character from the book that explores, promotes, or endorses empathy among themselves and the other characters in Frankenstein. According to Cheok et al., “Storytelling is an effective and important educational mean for children. With the augmented reality (AR) technology, storytelling becomes more and more interactive and intuitive in the sense of human computer interactions” (22). One particular theme I found that students can learn from “The Amazing Odyssey” is the unlikely friendships in Frankenstein. For example, in the 1931 Frankenstein film, where the creature meets a young girl. Although a little afraid, she accepts him and plays games with him. After they throw all the petals from a flower into the lake, he looks around for something else to throw. He picks her up and throws her in. In my VR game, this scene can be recreated with the creature and the little girl also having an unlikely friendship, but with him learning how to be a gentle friend.

One cool thing about this game is that ”the creature” will be able to collect books each time the player and character accomplishes a task. The more books the creature collects, the more he learns about his human nature. So, in the end, the students should have an empathic creature. Also, the more books you earn, the more levels up you go which creates a cool gaming aspect for the students. I have not found a virtual reality game like this. This game is for fifth grade – twelfth grade. Principals will definitely purchase this game for his/her teachers.

Baker, Jason, et al. “Teaching Social Skills in a Virtual Environment: An Exploratory Study.” THE JOURNAL FOR SPECIALISTS IN GROUP WORK, Vol. 34, No. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 209-226 https://ezproxy.stevenson.edu:2101/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=7&sid=6dcb2500-927a-4261-9933-59ce08a3b58d%40sessionmgr104

Cheok, David Adrian, et al. “Virtual reality and mixed reality for virtual learning environments.” Computers & Graphics 30 (2006) pp. 20-28 https://ezproxy.stevenson.edu:2106/S0097849305002025/1-s2.0-S0097849305002025-main.pdf?_tid=e1b51003-a517-48ce-911a-6b8a7ef8c5ef&acdnat=1542724968_d5eea48f1db6bb365e924cb5a4500301

Stephen Babcock. “This edtech startup is bringing virtual reality to the classroom.” Technical.ly. May 29, 2015. https://technical.ly/baltimore/2015/05/29/alchemy-learning-virtual-reality-classroom-oculus/

Language Immersion

Main Idea: VR experience where you get put into a foreign country and have to find and learn your way around without fully knowing the language.

Expertise: A lot of people in the world only know one language. While some of us are multilingual a good chunk of us only know English. People don’t realize how frustrating it can be to be in a country where you don’t speak the language. It basically leaves you isolated like Frankenstein’s monster. He starts to watch the family in the woods and slowly starts to pick up language from the sounds that that they make.(Shelly 83)

Learning experience: vocally NPCs in the game could speak this foreign language and the signs and world around them could be written in it. It could be a way of using maybe a foreign language made up with different letters from another alphabet with similar structure and vocabulary to English that way people could learn the language in a decent amount of time, but they would have to learn the language and slowly learn what it’s like. In the journal “Virtual World Anonymity and Foreign Language Oral Interaction.” it talks about how the participants of the test were a lot more confident in learning and practicing a language when they were anonymous. (Melchor-Couto 242).

Market: This would be good for school environments to learn what it is like to be an immigrant to a country that doesn’t speak the same language as your own. This can also be a great learning tool to see the language in action. This could help people trying to learn the language immerse themselves in the language and foreign culture to help learning. Forbes has an article written in 2016 by Ava Seave titled “In The Battle Of Online Language Learning Programs, Who Is Winning?”. This article describes the different language learning apps and compares profits for their English learning tools. The figures were $2.8 billion in 2015. (Seave).

Can Interactive VR Bridge the Gap through the Eyes of the Modern Prometheus?

The revitalization of Frankenstein into a modern-day virtual reality (VR) experience will help to not only pull out the real monsters from the eighteenth century but also help in recognizing the true monsters of today. The intended audience for this application is educational professionals that teach from high-school to undergrad programs. The secondary audience includes the students in these classrooms. These parties will be reached through interactive virtual reality. This application will retell a tale from over 200 years ago. The purpose and learning objectives of this game is to experience the world through the lenses of someone that sticks out from the rest. This chilling first person experience of the creature will invoke empathy in people who are different than us.

The research behind this is seen in “What Becomes of Empathy” by Tim Recuber. This article focuses on the empathy gap and the effect it has on others. It is when we feel and see our own subjective experiences versus the pain and experience of another person. This is also how bias, misunderstanding and miscommunication can spread. In the article, VR is mentioned as being a bridge for the empathy gap. The use of VR can also cause people to feel “a surge of empathy for those experiences we are immersed in” (Recuber, 2016).

This is an educational experience for these students because it will help them invoke empathy and relate to the creature. The game is set up so that the player does not realize that they are the creature until the game is almost over. This will help the player understand that it is important to get past a surface level appearance and instead focus on someone’s action. Through the revitalization of the story of Frankenstein by Mary Shelly, both hosts and players will gain a better concept of empathy, feel empathetic, and help bridge the empathy gap with people who are different than them. This can also be used as a narrative on bullying and why its important to understand others and their actions before persecuting them.

Four Paws: Training a Service animal

In 2003, an article written for Australian psychologist examined the importance of using humane education programs to increase empathy and prosocial behaviors in children (Thompson and Gullone). These programs utilized introducing children to non-human mammals, so they can better understand the needs of other. The proposed game, Four Paws: Training a Service animal, aims to act as a humane education virtual reality game. In this game, children will foster an animal, who will be trained to assist a mentally or physically disabled individual. It was found in a 2009 study, at Simon Fraser University, that when children play human-animal interactive games, like Nintendogs, there is an increase in empathy and compassion for others (Y.-F. L. Tsai and Kaufman). The researchers also found in a follow up study in 2014 that when a child is focused on a common goal with the animal, there is an increase in the understanding of the needs of others (Y.-F. (Lily) Tsai and Kaufman). The use of the service animal in this game is to act as a way to connect students to those who may not be like themselves. In Denise Gigante’s “Facing the Ugly: The Case of “Frankenstein””, she notes that it was not until the creature came to life that Victor becomes uncomfortable and began obsessing about how different the creature was from humans, although he was made of human parts and had not physically changed since becoming reanimated. It was not until Victor saw the constricted and limited movement of the creature that he began to fear the creature, who was similar to him but was not able bodied. Through this game, children will be given the opportunity to help those unlike themselves and gain altruistic behaviors. The benefits of this type of game can go beyond the classroom community and potentially into the everyday life of the player as they develop the skills to relate to others and their needs.

Thompson, Kelly L. .., and Eleonora1 Gullone e. gullone@med. monash. edu. a. “Promotion of Empathy and Prosocial Behaviour in Children through Humane Education.” Australian Psychologist, vol. 38, no. 3, Nov. 2003, pp. 175–82.

Tsai, Yueh-Feng (Lily), and David Kaufman. “Interacting with a Computer-Simulated Pet: Factors Influencing Children’s Humane Attitudes and Empathy.” Journal of Educational Computing Research, vol. 51, no. 2, Sept. 2014, p. 145.

Tsai, Yueh-Feng Lily, and David M. Kaufman. “The Socioemotional Effects of a Computer-Simulated Animal on Children’s Empathy and Humane Attitudes.” Journal of Educational Computing Research, vol. 41, no. 1, Jan. 2009, pp. 103–22. Baywood Publishing Company, Inc. 26 Austin Avenue, P.O. Box 337, Amityville, NY 11701. Tel: 800-638-7819; Tel: 631-691-1270; Fax: 631-691-1770; e-mail: info@baywood.com; Web site: http://baywood.com.