Ethnicity and racism has been and unfortunately still is a cause of many conflicts and inequalities. What if we could end racism in the world?

I wish I had a definitive solution to the problem, but I’m afraid it’s going to be an on-going endeavour. However, Virtual Reality has a great potential to bring people together and really help reducing ethnicity issues. This is what we will explore today.

The concept here is to change your ethnic group (also referred as race, but this can be a confusing term) to explore empathy for different ethnic group. I won’t list all the different ethnicities here, as there are many and going through each of them won’t really help picturing the experience. The concept of the Virtual Reality simulation here is for the actor to incarnate a member of an ethnic group that she is either not so familiar with or knows only from an outsider perspective. This in order to improve her empathy for the group, but also to broaden her knowledge of the ethnicity and open her mind more. If this can help fight racism in the world, that is an endeavor with potentially huge benefits and consequences!

Putting together an online VR world in which each person can choose their ethnicity and then interact with people of different groups is relatively easy compared to other experiences described in previous posts. However the impact and immersion of the experience relies on the actions of other people in the virtual world.

For more impact, some people will have to incarnate an Avatar of their own physical ethnic group while others will take an Avatar from an alien ethnic group. This way a real feel of the ethnic community can be experienced, as a good portion of the “actors” in the world will play themselves. People can get a feeling of how each ethnic group is perceived by others. Potential tensions, or even conflicts, with other ethnic group can be experienced. All this can help improving empathy.

A targeted offline experience can also be put together. Here a higher control of thedesigner over the “actor” makes it easier to increase the impact of the experience. Specific scenarios can be put together. Computer programmed members of different ethnic groups can put the “actor” in typical life situations for which he will have to make decisions. The same benefits as for the online experience can be achieved here.

Such an experiment has actually already been run at the University of California and the results were surprising. It was actually found that the experience had a tendency to exacerbate racist stereotypes, at least if the immersion in the virtual world was done over a short period of time. Over a longer period of time, the empathy might still increase and racist stereotypes lessen.

In summary, the results of a “changing your ethnic group” experience are expected to be beneficial long term, but it remains to be proven. Still it is an exciting challenge and a fascinating way to immerse oneself in a specific culture in a unique way.

In the next post, we will explore changing appearance in VR.