Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) premiered an experience called Becoming Homeless: A Human Experience at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. It was an experiment researching whether it’s possible to cultivate empathy through emboding a character who has lost their job, has to sell possessions to make rent, gets evicted, and starts living in their car. It’s designed to break down our stereotypes for how we imagine that people become homeless, and potentially overcome the fundamental attribution error which disproportionally blames people for their situation rather than acknowledging the deeper context of external factors. VHIL is hoping that they can reduce the cognitive load that’s required to imagine what someone’s experience might be like by providing an embodied and immersive experience in VR of walking in the shoes of another person and enabling the process of perspective-taking.
I had a chance to catch up with the writer & director team of Becoming Homeless, Elise Ogle, who is a project manager at VHIL, and Tobin Asher, who is the lab manager at VHIL. We talk about why the unmediated experience of presence in VR helps it outperform other forms of media, how they’re using VR to research empathy, their collaborations with empathy expert Jamil Zaki in exploring the thresholds to empathize, and the other social science work that they’re doing with the founder of VHIL lab Jeremy Bailenson.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So when I was at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, there's a number of different narrative VR experiences there. But there was also a science experiment that was going on there from Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. and you have the opportunity to embody someone who's going through a hard time in their life and you actually have to like sell off all of your items and you can't make rent and then you start to live in a car where a police officer starts to bug you for sleeping in your car and you're on this path of becoming homeless And the Virtual Human Interaction Lab is trying to use virtual reality to expand the possibilities of understanding the dynamics of social interactions with each other, but specifically looking at various things like empathy. And so the Virtual Human Interaction Lab is actually using virtual reality to do all sorts of interesting social science research. And They're publishing the results in all sorts of different academic journals, ranging from communication to computer science, education, environmental science, law, marketing, medicine, political science, and psychology. So VR is flexible enough to be able to do research in all of these different domains. So I had a chance to talk to the project manager and the lab manager of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at the Tribeca Film Festival, that's Elise Ogle and Tobin Asher, talking about this specific research that they were doing about empathy, but also some of the other social science research within virtual reality. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Elise and Tobin happened at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, April 21st, 2017 in New York City. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:59.846] Elise Ogle: So my name is Elise Ogle and I'm the project manager in the Virtual Human Interaction Lab. And what we're doing with VR is we're studying the psychological and behavioral effects of it. So how an experience like the ones here can change the way you think or the way that you act in the real world.
[00:02:16.070] Tobin Asher: And I'm Tobin Asher. I'm the lab manager at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. And like Elise said, a lot of our projects are focusing on how we can use VR to study behavior in VR and also once you've left and reentered the real world.
[00:02:32.473] Kent Bye: Great. So we're looking at this specific project here about homelessness. So maybe you could tell me a bit about your theory that you thought in terms of what you're trying to actually look at in terms of this study.
[00:02:45.322] Tobin Asher: Well I think a big thing when it comes to homelessness is a barrier to empathy is a lot of the stereotypes and this is probably true for a lot of issues that we face in society is that we have the stereotypes of you know how things occur and then we maybe blame the person for it but if you can go and have a unique experience where you start to understand that everyone's having a all these very different experiences and there's a lot of external factors at play. Well we hope to break those stereotypes down a little bit in this experience.
[00:03:17.019] Elise Ogle: Our lab's been around at Stanford for over 10 years and through those years we've studied the effects of virtual reality on empathy and what we found from those studies is that a virtual reality experience gives you an experience that is closer to one that is found in like real life. So if we compare there's this spectrum of media and like ideally you'd have a type of media that was exactly one-to-one the same as real life. You would have print media on the other end. VR falls somewhere in that spectrum, but it falls closer to a real life experience than traditional television. So when we look at studies like trying to reduce discrimination towards the elderly, trying to increase empathy for the handicapped. So we have these studies and we find that VR outperforms traditional media. So it has a greater effect than normal media. So we're still trying to explore and expand our studies to include different contexts and see how that changes people.
[00:04:16.507] Tobin Asher: There's a key term when we study virtual reality that we look at called presence. And presence, for those who may not know, is the experience that you're actively engaging something, that you're having that experience for real as opposed to passively watching it as you would normal television or movies or something like that. And so if we can give you that, what Elise said, feels like close to real life experience, well then maybe that can also sort of shape you in a very powerful way.
[00:04:45.492] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm curious to hear your definition of presence. You know, I've done an interview with Mel Slater, who talks about the place illusion and the plausibility illusion when it comes to presence. And, you know, I've looked at, you know, kind of my own elemental theory of presence by looking at both emotional presence, social and mental presence, active presence, as well as embodied presence. So there's different dimensions of presence that I see. I'm just curious to hear your definitions of presence.
[00:05:10.973] Elise Ogle: Well, we study all of them. I think it really depends on the person. So everyone goes through a VR experience completely differently. For some people, having another character in VR is what really makes them feel like they're in there. For some people, it could be a physiological response that indicates presence. So for me personally, doing the pit demo, for example, the classic infamous pit demo, I'm afraid of heights, and I just get in there. I'm breathing heavier, my palms get sweaty, and that is my own personal definition of presence. It's just when I feel like I'm so much in this environment that everything else doesn't exist. Everything outside the virtual world is gone.
[00:05:54.034] Tobin Asher: I think presence, in a very basic way, can be seen as no mediation between you and the virtual world, that you're not going through a medium, that you're feeling like you're there, and that is seen in so many different ways. And, like as you said, there are many different types of presence, environmental presence, social presence, all these different things, and that is measurable in a lot of different ways. When we're running studies, something we can do is measure your tracking data. So we know if you have a flinch response, if you get up to a person and they make a sudden movement to you and you make a sudden flinch back, these are all subtle or large measures that we can look at and actually evaluate in a very specific way to sort of start to measure how present someone felt in an environment.
[00:06:38.960] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that the work that is done at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab, that there's a lot of looking at social presence. And so there's different dimensions of cultivating social presence within this experience. I'm just curious to hear how you think about that.
[00:06:53.184] Elise Ogle: Well, I guess for this particular experience, the part where you're feeling, well, most people will probably feel social presence is in the bus scene when there's people there. We really try to harness the affordances of VR and have you move around the space. So, like, even though this is a seated experience, you're moving your head back and forth. You're trying to keep the man away from you, trying to protect your backpack. So we take advantage of those affordances and also like, you know, he gets closer to you. These are kind of things like social presence in real life. You don't want someone invading your physical space. So we can use that in a virtual experience, even though you know that person's not there, that can give us an indicator like, a lot of people flinch in that portion, so like they sit back really suddenly or like people scream occasionally. That would show us that, you know, they're feeling present in the environment. And then we've also looked at studies like maybe you can look at like how long a person's in VR and see if social presence changes like the longer the experience is, but we haven't actually done that kind of study.
[00:08:01.086] Tobin Asher: There's a lot of things that are exciting about VR as a medium in terms of engaging with others. And one of those things is being able to look someone in the eye when you talk to them, which you can't do when you Skype with somebody, which you can't do obviously over the phone and in all these other mediums. But with VR, even if an avatar doesn't necessarily look like a real person or like the person that you're talking to, There's a lot to be said for nonverbal communication and we look at that often a lot in our lab as well and looking at how people maybe look at each other and how maybe you can recognize somebody by the way that they move. We've done studies where we can show that if you are interacting with an avatar in VR or an agent in VR and that avatar mimics your movements at a few second delay, you tend not to recognize that the avatar is mimicking your movements but you tend to like that avatar better. So there's lots of different subtle ways that we can look at things in virtual reality that are a lot harder to study in the real world to look at how much of a role being able to engage with somebody in a non-verbal way but communicate with them that way can shape that interaction.
[00:09:11.158] Kent Bye: Yeah, and Chris Milk has famously called VR the empathy machine, and I think a lot of 360 video, you know, you're being put into a scene where you're seeing somebody else, and you're maybe able to invoke your mirror neurons in a certain way while you're co-present with them. But yet, in your experiences that you're doing here, you are looking at empathy from the perspective of embodiment, as well as having agency within the experience. I'm curious to hear your thoughts of a conceptual model around empathy and some of the open questions that you're really trying to ask around that.
[00:09:43.413] Tobin Asher: I think that VR is really great for empathy. It's a really great medium for it. It's not, at least in my opinion, like a magical tool, like you go into VR and you feel empathetic. It really depends on the context and the experience that you create. And a lot of what we study in the lab is what are the subtle nuances of experiences that may result in increased empathy or something else that we're studying. And we find that subtle tweaks can oftentimes change things. We look a lot at social perspective taking tasks in VR, and there's a lot of research that shows that what results in an effective social perspective taking task is oftentimes very subtle in terms of the information that you provide, that you can provide a little bit more context and it can be really effective, or you provide a little bit less context. and you have the opposite effect of what you're going for. And so these are subtle nuances that we have to study to understand better to create these experiences.
[00:10:48.663] Elise Ogle: But I would say in a lot of our studies, we really try to harness those affordances of VR. So like the fact that you can literally step into the shoes of another person and look down and see that you're a different person, it can have a very strong impact on you. You've never been able to do that before unless you were like putting on a costume. In this sense, when we create a virtual reality experience, if it's particularly for empathy, we take the guesswork out of perspective taking. So everyone comes to the table with a different level of imagination. So for some people it might be really easy to imagine becoming someone else, but for others it might not be as easy. So in VR we can just give you the experience, you know, you don't have to think about it. There's all these theories about like cognitive resources and if you can empathize and also imagine. In this we kind of hope that like maybe you can empathize more because you don't have to imagine. But as Tobin said, we have to make many iterations looking at the different nuances of the context of the experience and making sure we get it right.
[00:11:51.367] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on Paul Bloom's work against empathy, where he's talking about the limitations of empathy being that, you know, if people don't look like you, if you feel like they're different, then you actually have kind of like this in-group, out-group phenomena that if you're in the out-group, then you can actually have less empathy for people. So kind of looking at the shadow side of empathy. And if you see in virtual reality, you can actually kind of overcome some of those in-group, out-group dynamics by giving people different types of embodiment.
[00:12:19.152] Elise Ogle: So that's definitely something that we're studying right now. We work with a professor in the School of Psychology. His name is Jamil Zaki. He's one of the world's leading experts in empathy, not specifically in VR, but in general. So he studies the different pathways to empathy. So there's the like cognitive aspect and then there's the affective aspect. So is it, do you think about someone else's emotions and that changes your own emotions or Do you like absorb their emotions and you feel what they feel? What he studies is this like threshold to empathize. So at some point there might be an experience that is too much and you kind of go into like self-defense mode and you like whatever message is trying to get put across to you, you just don't pay attention to because it's too much. You're trying to like protect yourself. And so it's something that like you have to play around with the experiences that you create. you have to be cognizant that everyone's coming into this experience with a different life story. So there's some people coming in that have never experienced homelessness. There's some people coming in that have been homeless before, and it affects everyone differently. And so it's always interesting to see, just as far as empathy goes, if we have a wide range of people, it affects everyone differently, but we're looking to see more the themes affecting the most amount of people with the experience we create.
[00:13:38.860] Tobin Asher: Yeah, and as I mentioned before, we have seen, even in our lab, social perspective taking tasks where you do feel more different from the person that you take the perspective of. And that is a sign to us that, okay, we need to go back to the drawing board. What is it in the design of this in giving context and giving the experience that we're missing that we need to add into this experience? Is it more background information? Is it a different task that they're doing in VR? These are all the subtle things that we need to look at.
[00:14:11.338] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I went through your experience, I had this really interesting reaction as I'm sort of going into this scene. I'm sitting in a room and having to make a decision of what objects to sell, and I'm sort of looking at the aesthetics of the room, and I'm like, wow, this is kind of a really nice room. It's maybe like a high level of art and stuff that I wouldn't necessarily expect for somebody. So there's a judgment as to, well, maybe this person's living beyond their means, but also of like, from a VR design perspective, should this room be, you know, I would expect it to be kind of not as high end. So kind of a dual thing there. One is on a judgment of this person. Maybe they're living beyond their means or not managing their money well. But the other is maybe from a VR design perspective, like, is this actually realistic in terms of people that are in this situation? So just curious to hear your thoughts on that.
[00:15:01.560] Elise Ogle: So when we were creating this experience we did our best to create scenes that were realistic. Hopefully people can leave the experience knowing that everyone has a different story. The one story that you got to experience is just one part of like a human's experience so for everyone it's different we tried our best to not evoke stereotypes and I know that like it's it's super hard it's a tricky line to follow before so we had a different version of this the room was a lot more sparse and just the graphics weren't as good so we updated all of those but as far as choosing like how nice that apartment is supposed to look. I think what we wanted people to understand is that it could happen to anyone. For a lot of people it's not about like how much stuff you have, it's about how much support you have. And for a lot of people there is not support. for them when they become homeless. So it's easy for me to say like, oh, if I ever lost my job, if I ever didn't have a place to live, I could just go crash on my parents' house. But some people just like, they don't even have that opportunity. And so I guess it's just a matter of trying to add context, but also leave a little bit open to your imagination. Sometimes people interpret it different ways, which is what we like to see, like freedom of interpreting these virtual experiences, but all coming to like a theme in the end.
[00:16:24.053] Tobin Asher: Yeah, I think something that's really beautiful about virtual reality that is unique to virtual reality is that you have your own experience. We want to create an environment that you can explore, and we want to give some direction, otherwise it would just be empty space and you'd just be having fun, which is great, but not the experience we're trying to give. So we're trying to find a balance, and this all results from iteration, and so maybe we find that there's a key point that's not getting across and so the next version we have to do a subtle tweak to get that key point across. But we do like having that open interpretation in there.
[00:17:02.427] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I will say that going through that first-person perspective of making those decisions and kind of virtually have to sell off my different objects and it's still not enough and sleeping in the car and the police officer coming up, it felt like, okay, this is a trajectory of living in a home but becoming homeless and what that's like. And I think that it's not the one that I kind of stereotypically think of. I'm curious from your own VR design perspective of like what decisions you were trying to make in terms of giving people that experience and what you're trying to really build in terms of, you know, is this a representative experience, just a typical story or just the process of giving people one direct experience of that access into that journey of becoming homeless?
[00:17:45.373] Elise Ogle: Sure. So as we were coming up with the storyboard, we're doing the design, we found ourselves relying on our own stereotypes of homelessness, actually, like the homelessness that we see on the streets every day. And what we found, talking to experts, talking to the homeless, is that it really is like an iceberg. There's a lot that you see on the surface, but there's so much under the surface. There's people living in their cars. That's considered homelessness. There's people living on buses at night. They're not always on the streets. There's people, so many people, so many families with small kids living in shelters that you don't hear about, you don't see that side of homelessness. And we wanted to give an individual an experience that was general enough so that they might be able to feel like it could be them. And we also wanted to break those stereotypes of homelessness. And what we have with the last bus scene is a little bit more of a glimpse behind the different reasons why people become homeless.
[00:18:41.332] Tobin Asher: The full name of the experience is Becoming Homeless, A Human Experience. And that subtitle, at least to me, has sort of a dual meaning, and I'm sure there's a lot of different other meanings to it. But one is that this is a human experience, a human experience. So it's a single experience that people go through, but everyone has their own unique experience. And that's really key, is that this is one piece that's sort of drawn from a lot of different stories. But it's also a human experience. And I think a lot of times people forget that those who are different from us may also be very similar to us. We're all human. And so that bridge to empathy and reminding us that we're all here together.
[00:19:25.315] Kent Bye: So for you, what are some of the biggest open questions that are driving your research forward?
[00:19:31.373] Elise Ogle: The biggest question is how is VR different from traditional media and how can we harness those affordances to create an experience that can change the way you think or the way that you act for good?
[00:19:43.158] Tobin Asher: Yeah, I think that that really hits upon it. We're really looking at not just VR on its own, but compared to all these other different ways that we can reach people. And a really key thing for our lab is that we don't want VR to replace traditional media or real life experiences. We really think it's great as sort of a supplement to those. We want to think of these really salient experiences that are great for VR that would either be difficult to do or impossible to do or dangerous to do for whatever reason in the real world, or that just aren't as effective in traditional media. But we think that traditional media, and reading, and having real life experiences, and going on adventures in real life, if you can do something in real life, that's probably the best thing. But if you can't, then maybe there's a short, salient VR experience for that.
[00:20:34.991] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:20:43.892] Elise Ogle: I personally think that VR could really be great for education. In experiences, as Tobin was saying, things that are dangerous to do, impossible to do, counterproductive to do, or expensive. All of these things are really great use cases for VR. In the case of homelessness, there's a company in San Francisco that gives people homeless tours where you get to become homeless and you get to put on clothes that make you appear to be homeless and you go stay in the shelters with people. And it's really interesting to me. It's a way to get people's empathy to change, but also, you know, there's people that aren't homeless staying in shelters, taking beds for people that are homeless. So that's one of those simulations that looks like counterproductive to do. You want to teach people about it, but like... It was also like, is that hurting other people? So in VR, these experiences are free, quote, like free. It's a computer simulation. We can run it over and over. Everyone gets the same visuals. Everyone interprets it differently. And you just need access to the technology. So hopefully that changes, you know, makes it a little bit easier for people soon.
[00:21:52.153] Tobin Asher: I think it's hard to know where it's going to go. It's a question that a lot of people ask, you know, what's the future of virtual reality? And I think, in my opinion, that there are so many different futures. It's not going to go down one linear path. Everyone's going to branch out and take it because it's so malleable to whatever you want. You can customize it. You can do with it what you want. And so I think the future of VR is just going to spread really quickly in a lot of different directions.
[00:22:21.401] Kent Bye: OK, great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks very much. So that was Elise Ogle and Tobin Asher, the project manager and lab manager at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab from Stanford University at the Tribeca Film Festival, where they were showing their experience about homelessness, a human experience. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, I thought that the insight about perspective taking that there was a different dimensions of being able to project and imagine what it's like to be in somebody else's shoes. And the thing that virtual reality is able to do is just give you that embodied experience of those experiences and to set the context so that you have a simulated lived experience of what it's like to be in the shoes of another person. Now, the challenging thing that I heard over and over again is that everybody has their own unique life experiences. You have your own temperament and worldviews and beliefs and personality and the degree of trauma that you've experienced in your life, as well as just the extent that you have friends and families as a support network that are going to be able to support you if things go wrong. And so when all of that is stripped away and that you're basically like at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs where you don't have your basic needs taken care of, whether that's having a home or having access to food and shelter, then all of that stuff just creates a whole other different dimension that I think is perhaps really difficult to simulate the full intensity of that type of experience. I think that the thing that they're trying to do is give you a sort of an archetypal experience of like, you know, given from wherever you're at to, you know, a series of sequence of experiences that you're in your home, you have to sell all sorts of objects in order to try to make rent, you can't make rent, you start to You live in your car and then all of a sudden you're on the bus in the middle of the night and some guy starts just harassing you. And these sequences of events, I think, give you a flavor of some of the common experiences of people who are homeless. And it's something that really stuck with me. It's something that I had my own conceptualizations and stereotypes about what it means to be homeless and the path towards being homeless. And the thing that Elise said is that they have these empathy tours within San Francisco where you actually get embedded and sleep in a shelter. And I think to a certain extent, you're able to interact with some of these people and perhaps build empathy. But the other side of that is that you are potentially taking a bed to somebody who actually really needs it. I think with the virtual reality experiences, you have the potential to perhaps get the same sense of some of those archetypal experiences without taking a bed to somebody who really needs it. The real strength of virtual reality is it's able to kind of simulate a lived experience that's able to then trigger all of those new ideas about embodied cognition, distributed cognition, the extent that we have this extended mind and that we have to actually be embedded within situations where we have to perceive. But part of that perception is knowing what you can do to take action. And so the combination of perceiving and taking action and making decisions is something that they're trying to do. within the context of these various different VR experiences, whether it's trying to empathize with what it's like to be homeless, or chopping down trees to perhaps cultivate a sense of empathy for nature, or any other number of social science explorations that they're doing at the Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. They're also looking at different nonverbal communication. If an avatar mimics your movements, then you're more likely to have an affinity towards that virtual human. And so there's all sorts of different social interactions that, again, are difficult to have controlled conditions. And at Stanford, they're able to use these immersive virtual environments to be able to have a bit of a standardization when it comes to giving people a consistent experience with these different virtual human avatars. trying to see what are the deeper fundamentals of the human experience and how we relate to each other. So one of the things that makes empathy so interesting is that it is combining all of these different various systems within our body, whether it's our cognitive system, our emotional system, our body, or even if it's a phenomenological experience of having your own subjectivity, but being able to imagine yourself and projecting yourself into somebody else's subjectivity. So they've actually been using virtual reality to be able to expand our understanding of the nature of the human experience. And Jeremy Balanson actually has a book that's coming out early next year. It's called Experience on Demand. And I'm excited to check that out to be able to dive a lot deeper into the research that they've been doing there. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then there's a couple of things you can do. First of all, just spread the word and tell your friends. Grassroots word of mouth is one of the most effective ways to continue to grow this podcast. And secondly, just consider becoming a member to the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, which means I rely upon your gracious donations to continue to bring you this coverage and to make a living and travel and pay all of the web server hosting fees to be able to host the files. And I think that education and information wants to be free. 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