Exploring Virtual Reality as a Potential Care Technology

ABSTRACT

Virtual reality or VR is a technology that uses computers to generate simulated worlds. It has been attracting attention lately as, for some, it represents a new frontier in communication, while others are far from convinced. This paper proposes a recasting of VR as a technology for “care ethics.” It draws on some examples of work in environmental communication and sister disciplines that show that VR has activated empathy and enabled novel perspective-taking when it comes to communicating environmental issues such as ocean acidification or deforestation. The article also includes a discussion of the opposite, or how VR can activate apathy and desensitize others towards the environment. In addition, two new ideas are presented: One is the idea of ⁣⁣environmental wounding or wounds incurred while doing environmental work and how VR could partially help offer some relief. The VIRAL framework, based on care ethics and reimagination, is also proposed. The essay also touches on broader implications for new technologies and how they can be used as tools of care to address environmental and social challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual reality
• environment
• communication
• empathy
• care
• apathy

When we talk about virtual reality or VR as a physical technology, we mean a technology that can create a simulated reality using computers (Blascovich & Bailenson, 2011; Hillis et al., 2014; Minderer & Harvey, 2016). VR often requires: a head-mounted display (HMD) and additional touch or haptic devices, such as gloves. It has the ability to provide real-time feedback, giving it an eerily realistic feel. VR researcher Jeremy Bailenson uses the acronym DICE to further describe the key features of VR (Bailenson, 2018). By this he means that VR can provide dangerous experiences, for example interacting with a hurricane. VR can also convey the impossible, such as a human flying over soon-to-be-deforested terrain in Indonesia or a human city surviving climate change on Mars. Additionally, VR experiences can expose users to counterfactual situations, for example by exposing users to various sea level rise scenarios. Finally, VR experiences can convey very expensive scenarios, such as visualizing a geoengineering solution on a global scale (Bailenson, 2018). Fewer know that the realism of VR can also cause motion or simulator sickness (Fox et al., 2009).

Additionally, films like The Matrix and Ready Player One have popularized the technology, but we are probably still in a relatively early growth spurt. Partly due to a certain fascination with VR and its ability to reach and perhaps even change hearts and minds regarding environmental issues, environmental communication scholars have turned their attention to virtual reality, but as a field there is little research or engagement with VR. For example, I could only find three articles on this topic¹ published in the Journal of Environmental Communication since January 2007 (see Meijers et al., 2022; Meijers et al., 2023; Raja & Carrico, 2021).

How then do we, as an epistemic and praxis field, engage with VR, and more generally with things that can seem both shiny and new? Pezzullo (2017, 2023) argues that environmental communication could be a field that could be transformed beyond its crisis origin story into one that is, at its core, a care discipline. Likewise, VR should be reimagined as a care technology that embodies care ethics. Whyte and Cuomo (2016) describe care ethics as the advocacy of a constellation of actions, knowledge practices, and principles associated with caring for individuals and their fellow human beings (p. 235). Also embedded in Whyte and Cuomo's conceptualization of care is an ode to empathy versus apathy. I argue here that VR can be reimagined as a potential care technology that advances “the logic of care” (Quizar, 2022).

Specifically, VR as a care technology manifests itself in two specific ways: 1) its ability to generate empathy for the environment through emotional activation, 2) its ability to sooth, in part, spiritual and mental wounds that accompany what I call environmental wounding- or those mental, physical and spiritual wounds that arise from working in, working for, and seeing the environment in distress.

VR as a care technology first refers to the crucial ability to activate empathy, before I go into more detail about how. Let me describe empathy. There is currently no uniform definition of empathy. It's difficult to measure empathy at best, we can approximate it. Empathy has sometimes been described as an emotion and sometimes as a process (Belman & Flanagan, 2010; Decety & Jackson, 2004). Empathy in the broadest sense means taking someone else's perspective. In other words, does a person have the potential to put themselves in another person's shoes? VR has the unique ability to put people in someone else's shoes. VR researchers refer to this as VR's ability to transport the user into another existence, be it real or imagined or a bit of both (Fox et al., 2009). Beyond transportation, it is also about interaction (Minderer & Harvey, 2016), or giving the user the opportunity to engage with the characteristics of the simulated environment in which they find themselves. When VR creates this transport and interaction, something magical is most likely happening as users connect with the stimuli they see. Researchers have documented this connection between empathy and VR using experimental design (see Schutte & Stilinović, 2017). Additionally, in an environmental communication study on this topic, we placed people in a VR experience about ocean acidification (Raja & Carrico, 2021). Afterwards, people said they felt closer and that the majority of participants wanted to do more to address the problem of ocean acidification. In the same qualitative study, there was also evidence of humans associating with and anthropomorphizing marine life. For example, some people interacted with marine life (shells, seahorses) in the stimuli and talked about feeling empathy because the marine life they had named after people they knew had lost their homes due to ocean acidification.

Interestingly, in the study we mainly looked at first-time users, but there is evidence that the information conveyed in VR and the empathy subsequently experienced is likely to persist over time compared to other traditional forms of communication (print, film, etc.), (Ahn, 2015). In one study, researchers compared the effect of VR with a non-VR intervention on empathy and prosocial behavior. The authors found that subjects in the VR condition showed more personal distress and empathy immediately after exposure to the VR treatment. In addition, people in the VR condition self-reported more positive attitudes toward the homeless (the subject of the study) after 8 weeks (Herrera et al., 2018).

Additionally, VR perspective-changing exercises show promise in shifting attitudes. For example, in one key study, researchers designed an experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to either older or younger avatars (Yee & Bailenson, 2006). Respondents who were given older avatars showed improved attitudes toward seniors. Specifically, respondents assigned older avatars displayed empathy for the problems faced by the elderly because they had experienced similar problems in VR, like their older avatar's restricted mobility.

At the other end of care is pain. We now have a language to describe things like environmental grief, solastalgia, and climate anxiety, which in some way allude to the deep pain we feel when we witness the environment around us being destroyed or irrevocably altered (Albrecht et al., 2007; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018). When working with frontline environmentalists (Raja & Carrico, 2023), people described feelings of what I refer to as “environmental wounding.” This term refers in particular to individual and collective damage caused by work to improve the environment. For example, one can think of the environmentalist as a good shepherd who tries to do something to help and encounters pain in the process. For example, environmentalist/s spoke of suffering from severe anxiety, depression, and heart palpitations as a result of their environmental work (Raja & Carrico, 2023). Such wounds have physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions.

VR may have the potential to partially alleviate the mental dimension of environmental wounding. Evidence comes from studies in other fields but could be helpful to environmentalists, many of whom are working to communicate how our planet is dying. For example, VR has been used successfully to treat survivors of post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias in a controlled environment (Botella et al., 2015; Heo & Park, 2022). Second, researchers successfully used VR to help women with metastatic breast cancer by helping them connect with nature as a form of healing in a randomized, controlled, cross-over trial (Chin et al., 2022). In this study, women also reported less fatigue and depression after going through the VR nature experience. This study further indicates how VR makes digital nature accessible on demand. Since nature is unfortunately not easily accessible to everyone, VR may be particularly helpful when thinking about people who do not have easy access to nature. Third, VR can be an isolationist tool but also a collaborative tool (Abdullah et al., 2019) where building relationships, strengthening bonds, and maintaining kinship networks can take place, which in itself is a form of healing. Moreover, sharing experiences about climate change in immersive environments can help people deal with negative feelings such as anxiety while developing an action plan (Yavo-Ayalon et al., 2023). Fourth, VR also allows us to experience our ability to cause harm to the environment, which could help us course-correct. Consider a study in which researchers compared two conditions: in the first condition, people read in a brochure that a tree was being chopped down, and in another condition, people took the perspective of someone cutting down a tree. The researchers found that those assigned to the VR condition consumed fewer paper napkins than those who were told to read the tree brochure (Ahn et al., 2014), in other words, people changed their behavior slightly after they individually caused environmental damage in VR.

While VR has the potential to be a care technology, it can also go in the opposite direction by activating apathy. VR can and often does reduce nature for entertainment purposes and gaming. Certain VR games demonstrate this pattern by reducing nature to a stage, a landscape, on which domination is played out. VR games like Gorn, in which people fight in a gladiatorial arena, often to kill each other, illustrate how people use VR to commit violence against other, albeit fictional, people, while nature eerily fades into the background. The VR game also brings elements of nature directly into the violence. For example, in the game you can choose a number of weapons to kill your opponent. There's the classic selection of swords and maces, but also “clamping crab claws” and “wolverine claws” (Devore, 2020). Nature plays a double role here: it is the scene of violence (setting) and at the same time part of it (weapons). Additionally, there seems to be a fascination with aspects of nature that are used by their owners for either hunting or protection, for example, the designers’ decision to transform the claws of a crab and a wolverine into tools that largely claim human lives. This design choice, presented in the VR medium, not only reinforces this dual exploitation of nature in the VR world as a setting and weapon, but also establishes that nature (represented by clawing) kills other people, while at the same time cherry-picking from nature can reinforce the violence humans perpetrate, for example a user who puts on the claws to kill more efficiently and violently. Furthermore, caring is often gendered (Whyte & Cuomo, 2016). In comparison, these spaces are hypermasculine. The avatars in the VR space are bulging, muscular avatars whose sole purpose is to hunt and kill. Finally, these games are extremely immersive. For example, in a review of Gorn, a user described how exciting the game was and how intensely he played it, that after playing he felt “spent” and his “arms are noodles” (Devore, 2020).

In summary, VR can be a potential technology for empathy or for apathy. It mainly depends on the architects behind the technology and which path they take. If they choose the former rather than the latter, a framework such as the DICE framework (Bailenson, 2018), grounded in the ethics of care, is helpful. I end this short essay by proposing such a framework. This framework is guided by Pezzullo's (2017, 2023) reimagining of care and the care ethics previously discussed by Whyte and Cuomo (2016).

I use the acronym VIRAL to refer to five core principles when it comes to VR as a care technology. VR experiences should keep in mind the viewpoints (V) being prioritized in the experience. For example, in the ocean acidification study (Raja & Carrico, 2021) there is arguably only the user’s view, a sea critter’s viewpoint would augment the experience. VR experiences should be interconnected (I) experiences where 1) users can explore with other users and create social links or 2) experiences can show the way things are connected. Similarly, connecting with other users, avatars, or other creatures in VR and exploring environments can make these experiences uniquely engaging and may even draw attention and care to the content being communicated. For example, the ocean acidification experience used in our study first starts the VR simulation by placing the viewer in the middle of a traffic jam where they observe CO2 bubbles. The user is then transported to the deck of a ship, where the CO2 bubbles seep into the sea. The user is eventually transported to the ocean floor, where they can see the destruction of the car's CO2 bubble on the bleaching corals around them (Raja & Carrico, 2021). Interconnected VR experiences can help establish a path that shows how one thing leads to another, and so on.

Experiences should be respectful (R). When creating or using VR experiences, respect must be given to the people, avatars, creatures and inhabitants depicted. In particular, the saying that comes to mind is that if you don't treat someone or something the same way in real life, it shouldn't be okay in VR. In particular, there are concerns about cyber racism and the way Black, Indigenous, people of color and other socially disadvantaged people are portrayed and treated in digital content which includes VR (HREOC, 2002).

VR experiences are intended to enable further actions (A) for care. Experiences should have a certain practical dimension. For example, in the tree felling VR study, researchers found that some users used fewer napkins (Ahn et al., 2014). Although VR is an imaginative technology that has a lot of potential, one needs to return to the here and now. If we think of it as a care technology, there must be a real care action after the imaginary virtual experience is completed.

As a care technology, VR experiences should seek to liberate (L). Given that VR is an imaginative technology, there are no limits to its ability to represent and convey hypotheticals. With this in mind, creators and users should imagine how someone might be freed from oppression or injustice, or how someone might experience conditions that the oppressed must endure, with the end goal of motivating someone to do something. For example, the age discrimination study (Yee & Bailenson, 2006) shows young students the difficulties and prejudices faced by seniors in our society, where the end goal was to partially shift perceptions. VR is a perspective-changing technology. Perspective-taking and liberation share the idea of ⁣⁣escape. When changing perspective, users experience a kind of temporary escape from the prism of their own bodies, and liberation aims to help people escape from injustice and oppression. A VR care technology should then provide experiences that free our minds to the possibilities of solving social and environmental problems.

In this short article, I have briefly explored some facets of VR as a physical technology that creates material reality. With every technology there is the possibility of empathy or apathy, especially towards the environment and its living beings. Given the state of the climate, now more than ever we need technologies that do the former, not the latter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This claim is based on an examination of the term “virtual reality” in titles published in the Environmental Communication Journal from January 1, 2007 to October 7, 2023.