Making room for empathy in contemporary virtual reality cinema
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to redeem the idea that virtual reality (VR) might serve to foster empathy by rethinking both the notion of empathy and the ways contemporary VR films have attempted to generate it. Specifically, this paper considers two forms of embodiment—being and being with—in order to highlight some of the shortcomings of the ‘empathy machine’ discourse. In doing so, I also offer an alternative analogy: a tool for empathy, rather than a machine. Finally, an analysis of two key VR productions that invite users to be with characters—rather than putting users ‘in the shoes’ of a character—allows me to demonstrate how a more productive path towards empathy in VR might instead lay in experiences that create space—or ‘make room’—for the work of empathy to be undertaken by individuals who know and want to use VR as a tool, rather than as an end in itself.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it