Empathy enhancement through VR: A practice-led design study

Virtual reality (VR) has been widely acknowledged as a highly effective medium for augmenting empathy, enabling individuals to better comprehend and resonate with the emotions and lived experiences of others. Despite its acknowledged potential, the field lacks clear design guidelines and a systematic framework for creating VR environments for empathy training. In this article, we present a practice-led research project in which we triangulated design research using a paired sample t-test to evaluate and optimize the design guidelines of the empathy-training VR design (EVRD) framework. We evaluated the impact of a VR experience, designed based on the EVRD framework, on emotional, cognitive, and behavioral empathy among Chinese higher education students (n=84). A comprehensive assessment approach, including the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, interviews, system log analysis, and monitoring of donation activities was utilized, to measure changes in empathy before and after the VR intervention. The results validated the EVRD framework and demonstrated that it is a practical and systematic tool for designing a VR that training empathy. The findings of this study provide design insights with regard to (1) the process of VR empathy and (2) how to design "doomed-to-fail" interactions to promote cognitive empathy in VR.