The definition of Empathy, according to wikipedia, is: the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from within the other person’s frame of reference, ie, the capacity to place oneself in another’s shoes.

By putting yourself in someone else’s shoes (by making a focused mental effort to imagine their life), you can begin to understand their perspective, their motivation and goals and why they act the way they do.

This is a good way generally to make friends and simply to get on better with people, as described in more details in Dale Carnegie’s famous book How to win Friends and Influence People.

And if you want to take empathy further, you could do some role-playing and incarnate a person that has a different job, life environment and different standards. You could basically put yourself in someone else’s shoes and experience typical life situations that they have to go through (think of the program Undercover boss).

But what if you could take this approach further and grow your empathy to extreme levels? This is what we will dig into in this post and the coming ones.

Achieving extreme empathy is one promise of Virtual Reality (VR) that I find fascinating (I have played role-playing games for many years after all). VR offers the opportunity to take the Undercover boss approach and push it in various directions and to more extremes (anything is possible in an imaginary world, right?). And this at almost no cost and without the risk of putting yourself in embarrassing situations, or worse.

The goal of our endeavor here is to explore the empathy aspect of virtual reality, imagine various scenarios that can be experienced, touch on how they can be set up and see the benefits that they can bring.

One way to experience it in VR is to put the “player” or “actor” in specifically crafted scenarios, where they have to make decisions arising in the day to day life of people they are “role-playing”. Another and often complementary way is to put them in an online word where they have to interact with other people, using an Avatar that represents the person they role-play.

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of “situations”, “experiences” or “personalities” that can be explored:

1. Changing your age
2. Changing your profession
3. Changing your position inside your company
4. Changing your life environment
5. Travelling through time (variation of 4.)
6. Changing your gender
7. Changing your ethnic group
8. Exploring extremes
9. Conclusion

Let’s now explore each of these areas and see what they can bring, starting with “Changing your age”, in the next post.