Our journey of exploring how Extreme Empathy can be achieved with the help of Virtual Reality has taken us to both documented and uncharted territory.

Let’s recap the areas that have been 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
6. Changing your gender
7. Changing your ethnic group
8. Exploring extremes

Each scenario has its particularity, however we have seen that in each case, empathy can be substantially improved through immersive experiences, in a mixture of offline or online environments. Specifically crafted scenarios and situations, as well as interactions with other people’s Avatars are the main ingredients in shaping a meaningful experience that can have a real impact on people’s lives and help them achieve Extreme Empathy.

Some of these experiences have already been tested in a controlled environment and have shown direct benefits. Others still need to be assessed. In general, we have seen that Virtual Reality is a very promising technology for improving empathy.

At a less immersive level, most of these experiments can already be lived through thanks to role-playing and video games (in isolation or with other people). And of course empathy can be achieved in day-to-day life by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, using your brain.

As Virtual Reality gets deployed, more and more scenarios will be made available to pretty much everyone.

You could be involved in these developments, directly or indirectly, if you are interested or, even better, passionate about Virtual Reality. And your involvement could even be as simple as to share your ideas and give your views or analysis of the situation and future developments.

Exciting times ahead! Please share your thoughts below.

And if you want to exploring Virtual Reality further, I strongly recommend reading Infinite Reality by Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson:

Amazon US: 

Amazon UK: