Feeling good: humanitarian virtual reality film, emotional style and global citizenship

ABSTRACT

Virtual Reality (VR) film has been described as an empathy machine. Filmmakers and producers have claimed that VR film’s immersive qualities can amplify empathy for victims of humanitarian crises and move the viewer to support humanitarian aid organizations. This paper questions these transformative assumptions about VR film. We call attention to how humanitarian VR films are techniques that promote emotional styles like empathy through the script of suffering and hope. Through analysis of humanitarian VR films, the use of character, narrative, and formal VR film devices, we show how empathy is created. Thereby, we focus specifically on the simulation of particular locales, intimate encounters with the suffering Other, and gratification of viewer needs. The paper concludes that humanitarian VR films simulate an engagement with global problems when, in fact, they are catering to the emotional needs of people engaging with those problems. The global citizen as a feeling self becomes caught in interpersonal affective textures, which obscure geopolitical causes of humanitarian crises. Hence, the paper questions empathy as a universal way to better the world and diverges from the celebration of humanitarian VR film as a universal empathy machine.

KEYWORDS:

• Cinematic virtual reality
• empathy
• emotion
• global citizen
• VR
• virtual reality film

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1 Paul Bloom (2016) critically reviewed several of those dimensions. However, as Bloom’s and our argument share the idea of looking at empathy in a critical way, we leave the debate about empathy scales to psychologists.

2 In addition to addressing the general public through humanitarian VR film, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research is developing VR experiences to train humanitarian aid workers. For example, UNOSAT developed a 3D model of the Za’atari refugee camp featured in Clouds that can be explored with a VR headset. Eventually, such applications could be used to make decisions remotely (UNITAR, Innovative applications for the humanitarian community).

3 Three more films are listed without links from the World Food Programme. However, these films are below five minutes and present short reports by WFP employees rather than VR film narratives. Unlike the other films, they do not exhibit carefully constructed VR film form and are therefore excluded from consideration in this paper.

4 The concept of social presence is defined as the illusion of being with someone, which is a crucial aspect of many VR experiences and has been discussed in the literature (e.g. Biocca 1999, Heeter 2003, Lee 2004).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was partially supported by the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee, Hong Kong [Pi Tim Gruenewald, grant number 17616519].

Notes on contributors

Tim Gruenewald

Tim Gruenewald is Assistant Professor and Director of the American Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong. He is the co-editor of Imperial Benevolence: U.S. Foreign Policy and American Popular Culture since 9/11 (2018) and the special issue East–West Flows: Cinematic Currents Between China and the United States (Asian Cinema, 2018).

Saskia Witteborn

Saskia Witteborn is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication and Associate Director of the Research Centre on Migration and Mobility at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She researches mobility and technology using culturally grounded approaches to communicative action around agendas for change. Her research has appeared in leading communication and migration journals, and she is co-author of the recent Sage Handbook of Media and Migration (2019).