For many, the phrase virtual reality (VR) evokes images of consumer-targeted video games and strange-looking headsets. VR is particularly innovative for how it places the user inside a simulated environment: using the latest computer technology and distinctive head-mounted displays, VR tech can simulate a surprising number of sensory experiences, including vision, sound, touch, and smell. VR allows users to step inside and interact with a fully-immersive, computer-generated 3D world. Take a step forward or turn your head, and the graphics of your simulated reality react accordingly.
VR is an exciting area of growth for consumer gaming and wearable technology. But what do the simulated worlds of VR technology have to do with global social impact?
Everything, according to Dr. Ben Lok, professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Florida and Co-Director of VR for the Social Good.
Dr. Lok and his students at the UF Program for Human-Centered Computing have witnessed the ways in which virtual and humanitarian realities are already colliding with measurable impact, and they’re at the forefront of a movement to create awareness for these positive disruptions in social impact tech. As Dr. Lok explains in his TedX talk “Virtual Reality, Real Change”, complex humanitarian issues are often first approached through financial, political, and legislative means: we tend to throw an abundance of funds and policies at nuanced social challenges. More often than not, little seems to stick.
A Technology of Narratives
To start creating scalable, sustainable change, Dr. Lok suggests we invest in changing hearts and minds: a challenging, he admits, though not impossible task. In the world today, there are 180 million children without adequate access to corrective lenses. To this problem, Dr. Lok asks, “What if we could see their world, through their eyes?”. With the help of VR technology, Dr. Lok’s students created a virtually immersive experience that allows anyone with a smartphone to experience what life might be like when such a basic sense as sight is dulled. Other student-led immersive projects include a walking tour of the UF campus for visitors whose first language is not English, and a VR project addressing college students’ apathy towards the influenza vaccine. To his students and to anyone committed to creating lasting change, he asks, “What if we retold these issues as stories?”
Virtual reality has the potential to take empathy beyond mentally putting ourselves in another’s shoes: research on immersive virtual environments has shown that “”embodying” another being presents a different experience from simply imagining you are someone else”. Other examples include:
- Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET): a treatment option for certain anxiety disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Nonprofits like Trickle Up, a global poverty alleviation organization, are using VR tech to give individuals a taste of what life is like for the communities they support.
- “Clouds Over Sidra”, an award-winning VR film released by the UN that follows a 12-year-old Jordanian girl named Sidra who lives in a refugee camp during the Syrian civil war.
Could virtual reality experiences be used to better understand issues like the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen or the plight of climate refugees? If empathy is as powerful a human tool as researchers like Dr. Brené Brown believe it is, the future looks promising. (For a quick, awesome introduction to empathy, watch Dr. Brown’s video here)
Narratives of Technology
The excitement around emerging technologies like virtual reality is undeniable, but the real story of VR as a medium for social good is not it’s novelty, and it’s not necessarily about technology: it’s about genuine steps towards experiencing someone else’s reality. Though we may never be able to fully grasp the depth of another perspective or lived experience, VR is just one way we can compel action through mutual understanding. When we start to see humanitarian issues not simply as problems to be solved, but as stories of real people and perspectives that demand honest and radical empathy, approaches like virtual reality become a powerful medium for social good.
“Think of a story that needs to be told… whose eyes are you seeing it through?”
Dr. Benjamin Lok
VR is a technology of narratives, but it also shows us how the narratives of technology— the stories we tell ourselves and others about who can develop technology and who can use it– can greatly diminish or magnify its potential to do the social good we aspire to. Throughout his career, Dr. Lok has witnessed a narrative that VR is a technology that we must simply consume and enjoy– one that we don’t get to control. A growing number of engineers, designers, and virtual storytellers are working to change that. New user-driven educational opportunities are making it easier than ever to create your own VR experiences: this week, Codecademy, a popular online platform with free coding classes, launched Learn A-Frame, a course teaching users with basic HTML knowledge how to build their own VR experiences. Even without a programming background, you can develop and share VR experiences with just a smartphone.
On VR & Spontaneity
It doesn’t take a pandemic to know that life generally doesn’t move according to plan. Cancelled internships and widespread layoffs have been reality for many, forcing us to pivot in unexpected and often non-ideal ways: I have an engineering friend doing a marketing internship, and as a computer science major, I’m working on product research and design, doing much less of what I’m used to and much more of what I’m not. There are hidden advantages to uncertainty, and not just for the sake of a lesson or developing the ability to make the most of a less-than-ideal situation. The more I reflect, the more I see how the most influential people I’ve met and circumstances I’ve been in often had a lot more to do with my openness to something different than with any ability to plan on my part.
Dr. Lok wasn’t introduced to VR in a graduate lab or high-profile tech company. He found the technology that transformed his career and ability to do good as a high school student in an arcade, visiting for the summer in his home country of Malaysia. He couldn’t have known exactly how the then-nascent technology would shape his own trajectory and worldview, but he also wasn’t constrained by a self- or culturally-imposed career plan: at the time, he was just a kid in a bulky-looking headset, watching a pterodactyl fly overhead as he battled his virtual opponent, allowing himself the headspace to experience an alternative reality. Dr. Lok’s experience doesn’t demonstrate that planning isn’t critical for our own ability to do good, or for altruism in general. It’s just to say that sometimes, the best plan is to be open to whatever comes next.
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