Seeing From the Users' Eyes: An Outlook to Virtual-Reality Based Empathic Design Research

Abstract

The extent to which designers can understand users often determines the quality of design outcomes. A deep understanding of users allows the designers to focus on the right problem and make optimal design decisions, which encouraged designers to empathize with users. However, the current imagination-based empathizing strategy appears to be too susceptible to their previous experience and knowledge, which has been questioned concerning effectiveness and accuracy. On the other hand, Virtual Reality (VR) technology provides an opportunity for designers to gain experience-driven empathy by immersing them in a virtual environment that mimics the users' surroundings as if they are seeing the world from users' eyes. While abundant studies covered empathy VR and empathy for design, limited attention has been paid to the chance of bringing VR, empathy, and design research together. Addressing this gap, this study explored literature across domains, identified major concerns about this approach, synthesized the evidence, and discussed the feasibility and validity of the VR-based empathic design research approach.

Bridging Designer-User Gap With a Virtual Reality-Based Empathic Design Approach: Contextual Information Details

“…The former usually relies on humans' automatic emotional functions, while the latter requires deliberate perspective-taking (Eres, 2016;Shamay-Tsoory et al, 2009). In turns of perspective-taking, humans may adopt an imagine-self or imagine-other strategy, which respectively triggers self-related knowledge and evokes altruistic motivation and behaviours (Batson et al, 1997;Davis et al, 1996;Hu et al, 2021a).…”

“…Attempting to address this concern, prior research proposed a Virtual Reality-based empathic design approach that intends to use Virtual Reality (VR) as an "empathy machine". This tool has the potential to enable users perceive the world from their own perspective (Hu et al, 2021a). The rationale behind this approach was that first-person immersive VR experiences can effectively elicit human empathy for unfamiliar groups (Herrera et al, 2018) and can reduce misunderstandings and related stereotypes (Yee and Bailenson, 2006).…”

Building Social Justice Character Through X-Reality Technology: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In addition, the characters needed to become a Social Justice Warrior (hereinafter referred to as SJW), will emerge from the ability to feel empathy [12]. These characters can be supported by VR technology which is also known as Empathy Machine, because there is no previous technology that can increase a high sense of empathy [13] through immersion (a perfect replica of the real world), presence (a sense of equal presence between the real & virtual world), embodiment (body subject self). Empathy activates our feelings to understand the other person through perspective and pain so that we can provide assistance to him or her.…”

Narrative self-recreation in virtual reality

“…In this sense, experiencing a story in a virtual setting can work for other conditions, such as those that target acquiring social skills (e.g., autism), building motivation and changing self-perception (e.g., eating disorders), fighting with negative patterns (e.g., addiction), rehabilitation (e.g., after-stroke), Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) (e.g., movement disorders), and so forth (Roemmele et al, 2017;McMahon, 2022). This application of VR is not novel (for example, Strickland, 1997) but rather an instance of the broad application possibilities of IDNs designed to address and answer needs (Jeffs, 2009) that are more general, such as education, entertainment, training, therapy, and those that are more fine-tuned, such as socialization, rehabilitation, cognitive enhancement (Lányi et al, 2006;Georgiev et al, 2021), building and transferring specific skills (Bryant et al, 2020), fighting with specific habits and behaviors (Rizzo et al, 2000), and reinforcing abilities such as empathy (Fenison, 2020), motivation, and creativity (Hu et al, 2021). This characteristic of interactive immersive technology needs to be understood further, as it might fit into certain niches where other attempts to restore or heal humans' balance of well-being have failed (Coyle et al, 2012).…”