This painting reveals the lifestyle of all levels of Northern Song society from rich to poor as well as different economic activities in rural areas and the city, and offer glimpses of period clothing and architecture. It is amazing to see how every single people and building in a painting becomes alive through VR. I was super moved when I put my VR headset on and stand in the middle of the street, seeing businessmen pushing carts across me, officials riding tall horses, and ordinary girls buying her favorite snacks on the street.
Example 2: Google Earth VR
Google Earth VR puts the whole world within our reach. With Google Earth VR, we can go anywhere in virtual reality. Whether you want to go back to your hometown when you are in a foreign country, enjoy the sunset at Santa Monica beach, or strolling lower Manhattan, there’s no shortage of things to do or ways to explore.
In the real world, there are lots of limitations such as time and budget so that we cannot travel wherever we want. As a result, it’s hard to understand other cultures without even seeing it. With the help of VR, I think it helps people understanding other cultures in the first step: experiencing it. Just like learning a language, the best way to learn is to put yourself into an environment where people speak that language, Google Earth VR put people into a near-reality environment where people can see and experience another culture.
Example 3: 360° Travel inside the Great Pyramid of Giza — BBC
Produced by BBC, this is a short tour inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. There’s a narrator in this video and it makes this video more immersive by saying “Now you are in the heart of the Great Pyramid of Giza”, “Going along this path..”, etc. With only black and white in the scene, the uniqueness of this tour is that audience can really feel the narrowness and the darkness inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, and I even saw some comments mentioning that it is’ very scary yet real.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is a defining symbol of Egypt and the last of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World, this way of storytelling can help people in our era feel closer to the culture which is long long time ago. This reminds us that VR can not only help people understand culture laterally but also longitudinally.
Empathy is a possibility to realize what other person feels as a result of his/her experience. Very often this notion is understood as the ability to empathize with a human or to put oneself in his/her place. There’re always discussions about whether VR, as a new storytelling tool is a viable intervention for inducing a state of empathy.
While some experiments show that watching a documentary in VR was not substantially different from watching it on YouTube with respect to the extent to which an individual empathizes with the emotional experience of another person, other shows that it can change people’s empathy level from emotions to behavior. One example is an experiment conducted at Stanford University in 2011. It is about the difference in attitude to the environment depending on the existence of VR experience. Participants of the experiment were divided into 2 groups. People from the first group just read about the tree which had been cut down. The members of the second group had to do it personally in the virtual world. After that, all the participants declared that they felt responsible for the state of the environment. However, this was not the end of the experiment.
