For my graduate student project, I conduct an experiment doing research on the potential effect of virtual reality on viewer empathy in News Media. This study is guided by Prof. Carol Liebler together with Noah Buntain and Dongqing Xu from the Media Studies program.

The origin of this study is quite simple. We have heard a lot of sayings of virtual reality can be treated as the ultimate empathy machine which is capable of arousing people's empathy towards a certain topic. Yet in the academic field, we can hardly find solid evidence proving that virtual reality is truly capable of increasing people's empathy level. Also, current studies on testing empathy effect on virtual reality are based on post-test only experiments where it is not convincing that the fact that virtual reality group has a higher level of empathy is total because of virtual reality as a tool.

We conduct the experiment in the Innovation Lab. In order to control factors, we divided our participants into three groups. One control group and two experimental groups. The control group is given a scenery video while the other two groups are given the refugee news clips by the New York Times. One standard video group is given the video using a standard computer monitor while a 360 video group is given the video using an HTC VIVE.

We tested possible VR effect on empathy as well as emotional arousal and presence. The result is not very promising but that might due to our small sample size. We didn't find support on 360 videos has a more powerful effect on people's empathy. Also, we think an empathy increase might just because of the novelty effect instead of VR itself.

We are still working on that and hope a larger sample size will give us a clearer look at this topic.