When Zuckerberg apologized the next day,
It would be easy to see this statement as a canned bit of damage control, as another in a long line of half-hearted mea culpas mass-produced by Silicon Valleypublicists for their frequently offending bosses. But it’s worth taking Zuckerberg seriously. When he talks about empathy, he means it.
Empathy is a word that suffuses the tech industry. The ability of an engineer or a designer to put themselves in someone else’s shoes is widely considered critical for creating a successful user experience. But with VR, empathy isn’t just a design value – it’s a sales strategy.
Empathy is the cornerstone of the tech industry’s masterplan for mainstreaming VR. It’s the “killer app” that Silicon Valley hopes will transform VR from a fringe curiosity into a technology that’s as deeply embedded in our daily lives as smartphones and social media.
VR enthusiasts often describe it as an “empathy machine”. By creating an immersive and interactive virtual environment, a VR headset can quite literally put you in someone else’s shoes. Text, image, or video offers only partial views of a person’s life – with VR, you can get inside their head. And this high-fidelity simulation, the argument goes, will make us better people by heightening our sensitivity to the suffering of others. It will make us “more compassionate”, “more connected”, and ultimately “more human”, in the words of the VR artist Chris Milk.
