Abstract:

Research on Virtual Reality (VR) has demonstrated some of the affordances of this technology to build empathy. Empathy is defined as is a construct that represents an emotional response to suffering of others. Empathy as a construct consists of two components: emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. One the one hand, emotional empathy is related to be emotionally moved by a situation. On the other hand, cognitive empathy involves understanding the thoughts and the emotion of others and this has been regarded as perspective taking. One of the main advantages of VR to build empathy is that VR allows participants to be in the shoes of others and this increases perspective-taking.

Previous research has investigated the use of VR to create empathy for migrants so that people can understand the situation of migrants around the world. In this paper, we describe the design and development of a VR environment to create empathy about Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. The VR environment was developed by the authors using the Unity game engine and the deploying device was the Oculus Quest VR headset. The VR environment tells the story of a migrant that left Venezuela and moved to Colombia. In the VR experience, the participant is first situated in a 3D representation of a city in Venezuela showing the most important places of that city. The participant can freely move in VR by teleporting and is encouraged to follow some visual cues in the ground to understand the story. When the participant moves closer to a point of interest in the story, a picture of the real site is shown so that the participant can see how the real site looks like. A bridge connects the city in Venezuela to a city in Colombia and the participant has to cross the bridge. The bridge also serves as a medium to show some text fields with another part of the migrant’s story. After crossing the bridge, there is a large representation of a city in Colombia where some other parts of the story are developed. Moreover, in a large TV screen in the VR environment, a video of the city is shown. A more detailed description of the VR environment and how it tells the story is provided in the full paper together with screenshots of how the VR environment looks like.

To validate the VR environment, a cross-sectional evaluation study was conducted with 22 university students (14 female and 8 male) from a wide range of undergraduate programs. The instrument consists of the following seven scales for a total of 33 Likert scale items: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, attitudes toward migrants, engagement, presence, immersion, and user experience. The research procedure and instruments were approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of the university where the research study took place. The informed consent was obtained from all participants.

The results showed that the VR environment has a positive effect on emotional and cognitive empathy with higher results on emotional empathy. The results also show positive perceptions in terms of immersion, presence and engagement. Regarding usability, this study allowed us to identify some usability issues to improve the VR environment. Moreover, in the paper we suggest some recommendations for the design and development of VR environments for creating empathy for migrants.

Keywords:

Virtual Reality, Migration, Cognitive Empathy, Emotional Empathy.