Virtual reality witness: exploring the ethics of mediated presence

Abstract

The notion of immersive witness underpins much of the exploration of VR by journalists and humanitarian organisations. Immersive witness links the experience of VR with a moral attitude of responsibility for distant others. In accounts of media witness, the ability of the media to sustain an experience of presence has played an important, albeit often implicit, role linking the spectator spatially and temporally to distant suffering. However, the concept of media witness has to date assumed that the media represent, that news stories and documentaries present to their audiences images and sounds that communicate something of an event. VR, in contrast, seeks to simulate, providing the audience with something of an experience that is linked in various ways to the experiences of others)t is this simulative function that is seen as fundamental to VR s moral address. This paper explores the moral potential of VR suggesting that while there is much to recommend VR as a platform for humanitarian communication there is an inherent moral risk attached: the risk of improper distance. The United Nation s VR work serves as a case study for exploring VR s moral potential and the risk of improper distance.

A Sense of Place: VR Journalism and Emotional Engagement

“…Observation is characterised as passiveness since the user does not assume a role in the story, and the omniscient perspective refers to being a tourist, when the initial task of the user is to direct attention according to the VO. In fact, studies have shown that the majority of IJ projects tend to utilise two or more POVs (Bevan et al 2019;de la Peña et al 2010;McRoberts 2018;Nash 2018). Therefore, the shift in perspectives can confuse the user when differentiating between the emotions represented in the story and the emotional responses felt by the user (Sánchez Laws 2017).…”

“…The purpose of VR is to simulate experiences for the audience while serving as a communicative medium. Nash (2018) argued that, despite the prominence of VR technology's ability to enhance empathy toward the characters, it may draw more attention to the user and the quality of the experience. Concerns about empathy being produced by using dramatic and/or even traumatic media content to create more perceptual, realistic experiences have initiated an ethical discussion concerning IJ (de la Peña et al 2010; Kool 2016; Sánchez Laws 2017).…”

“…Discussion of the potential of immersive media to create engagement with others has become more prevalent in recent years (e.g., de la Peña et al 2010;Jones 2017;Nash 2018;Sánchez Laws 2017). Studies on VR journalism have highlighted IJ's ability to offer strong emotional experiences by allowing users to experience stories from a first-person perspective by inhabiting the story's setting (de la Peña et al 2010;Kool 2016;Maschio 2017;Sánchez Laws 2017;Sundar, Kang, and Oprean 2017).…”

Humanitarian Documentary: A Comparison Study between VR and Non-VR Productions

“…Another problem is that the proximity with a subject can be uncanny, so emotional scenes can end up being awkward or even disturbing. This happens in <Waves of Grace 2015>, where main character Decontee Davis is crying and the viewer is placed extremely close to her (see Figure 5), but is ultimately unable to console her, generating an uncanny experience [5]. Other inconsistencies can occur in the moment of recording itself.…”

A Mediography of Virtual Reality Non-Fiction

“…There is a corresponding groundswell of research into VRNF, particularly into ways that affordances of VR -"presence" [e.g. 11,9,4,1,13], "immersion" [e.g. 5, 10] and, perhaps, "empathy" [e.g.…”