Sunday, September 10, 2017

‘Headspace VR’ Study Examines Audience and Empathy

By Erin Reilly and Amara Aguilar



Ajene in awe with his 1st time experiencing VR.



As 20-year old Ajene Harris slipped on a Samsung Gear VR headset for the first time at the University of Southern California Innovation Lab, his mouth dropped.

The USC communications major began to be immersed in the New York Times’ “Fight for Fallujah,” a virtual reality story that takes users to a war-torn area filled with conflict.

He watched the piece, along with seven of his classmates in USC Annenberg’s Advanced Journalism for Mobile and Emerging Platforms class.

The experimental journalism class focuses on 360 storytelling, artificial intelligence, mixed reality, augmented reality, chat bots, voice command devices and storytelling with other emerging technologies. Research is also an integral part of the class.

During the spring 2017 semester, the students in the class participated in a preliminary study that looked at how six virtual reality stories with the theme of war and conflict affect users’ emotions, specifically: Apathy, Sympathy and Empathy.

Most of the students had only experienced 360 stories on their mobile devices, and not through a headset, which triggered mouths to drop and “wows” as they realized immersing oneself through a headset was a completely different experience.  

“Because all of the stories focused on war and conflict — a theme that can feel quite far away and impossible to grasp for a person who has not personally experienced the conflicts of war — it seems that generating true empathy in a viewer is rooted in the development of some shred of a personal connection — a common ground — between the viewer and the characters in each respective story," USC student Emily Czachor said in a focus group.

The study, entitled “Headspace VR,” aimed to connect the heart to the head as students stepped inside virtual reality. It combined qualitative and quantitative data—including surveys, interviews, and data collection using neuro-technology, biosensors that tracked heart rate, and skin conductivity.

“Overall, from viewing all of these VR pieces, I learned that a VR experience through a headset makes a world’s difference than just playing that same VR piece online in a web browser,” USC student Moera Ainai wrote in a Medium post. “It is almost like an out-of-body experience in some cases. No matter how much I liked or disliked the storytelling techniques in each piece, every time I took off the gear, I would have to adjust back to the classroom setting I was actually sitting in the entire time. I felt real emotion, whether it was for Sidra or someone in solitary confinement, and that was what turned what was just a few minutes in a headset into a meaningful experience.”

Students critically reflecting on the
narrative style of the VR stories.
The results show that virtual reality breathes with story and character.  For many of the participants, it was more important that the journalistic stories were narrated in the third person point of view than from a live action main character in order to foster empathy.  Participants would rather virtually walk beside another person, than walk directly in that person’s shoes. Human characters were the lifeblood of the stories, according to preliminary research results.  

Post survey results showed “Clouds over Sidra” had the strongest storytelling quality and biosensor data affirmed participants had a significant higher emotional intensity with it than with the other narratives.


Many shared walking alongside Sidra, the main character, and hearing her story gave a sense of inhabiting the space and better identifying and sharing in the complex emotional feelings characters portrayed.  This, in return, stirred affective empathy in each participant.
“A personal narrative makes people care about the story and, thus, feel immersed and involved in the outcome of their lives. I could relate to the VR experiences and empathize with the characters’ struggle or living situation when I had a subject to latch onto emotionally,” Gabriela Vidal said.

However, the environment is an emerging leading character in a VR experience, according to the study results.  It is the heartbeat of a 360 story.  For example, though “Project Syria” didn’t resonate across all participants as immersive, it did have the highest emotional activation with the three narratives used to collect data with the neuromarketing biosensors.


Emotional Activation is events (something that happens) that instantaneously captured the attention. Project Syria correlation of all data shows that one moment (when a bomb goes off) had the highest emotional activation.  

In addition, though many participants realized they were in a classroom sitting in a chair viewing the story through a VR headset, participants shared that of all the varied media creating the VR experience, the audio took them to another place and made them feel lost in the moment. The more powerful VR stories had spatial audio, a technique that captures sound in all directions of the environment helping to direct the viewer’s attention in the environment.  From a medium perspective, audio is the key to ensuring a sense of “being there” and encourages the most emotional impact.  

“As far as empathy is concerned, I really liked when the narratives were genuine and used real characters or even audio to move the narrative,” USC student Tiffani DuPree wrote in a Medium post. “For example, I was able to empathize with the characters while watching Project Syria before I even knew the audio had been taken from real events. Somehow, just listening to the audio and watching the computer-generated characters in the story made me understand the story even more.”

So if the environment is the heartbeat of a VR storyworld and spatial audio helps to build and support emotional impact, then the old adage of KISS it (keep it simple stupid) may apply.  Creators have an entire toolset to pull from in shaping a story.  Yet, layering additional text, animations or additional video (ie: picture within picture) should be considered as unnecessary complexities to avoid. Being more simplistic with a focus on higher production value and quality continued to appear as important to participants. Students did not relate to animated characters as much as they did to cinematic ones, where they could see human faces in a real world environment.

I felt as though reliance on graphics and animation to tell the story actually diminished its immersive quality, and served as a constant reminder to me — the viewer — that the world I was experiencing was, in fact, merely a simulation, rather than a replicated world of which I was a part,” Czachor said in a focus group interview.

Putting audience first
The study was done to better inform the news industry about audience engagement, best practices for journalistic virtual reality storytelling and to look at what motivates users to become more engaged citizens.

Many news organizations have recognized the importance of focusing on audience engagement. With this virtual reality study, we applied the Leveraging Engagement framework to examine in what ways audiences would take action after viewing VR stories.  What motivated participants behavior the most was an interest in watching (entertainment), immersing themselves in the environment for a moment (immersion), and at best, creating a personal connection to who they are as a person (identification).  

However, the experiences were limiting in providing enough time to really understand the topic (mastery) or material to get behind it and take action (advocacy).  With VR being an emergent technology, one would think that sharing it socially with others would be a strong motivator (social connection).  However, with the few participants that shared with friends, it was always in person rather than what we might assume, online via our social networks.  This means two things.  The sharing functionality within the VR environment needs to be further designed and developed.  And, the sharing in person with friends meant an importance of watching reactions over viewing it individually in a VR headset.

After watching “Clouds Over Sidra,” Anai wrote in a Medium post that her view on the subject matter washeightened immenselyand it made her “want to look more into the crisis as well as share the stories and spread just how important this matter is.” She added, “It kills me that [I] alone can’t make a difference.”

It’s unclear that VR is enough of an experience to stand alone for viewers to take immediate action on the cause or subject shared.  Each time, the participants watched a VR story, we offered a printed Take Action worksheet with reminders and follow up links for four weeks after viewing.  This gave participants additional opportunities to further engage in the subject matter from watch it again, share it with a friend, read more, join, donate… all the way to connecting with the creators and distributors with write a note to download their app and watch more.

Erin discusses research with YBVR.
How we did it
The research project was led by ReillyWorks director Erin Reilly and professor Amara Aguilar in collaboration with YBVR implemented at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Our methods of collecting data included surveys, video diaries, focus groups and interviews, combined with head-tracking heat maps.  The study examined six pieces. Below are the six narratives with descriptions pulled from each website.

"Nearly one half of Syria’s 23 million people have been displaced in its civil war and no group has been as severely affected as children. Children make up more than half of the three million refugees living in camps or makeshift housing and some news reports indicate that children are actually being specifically targeted in the violence."

"Meet Sidra. This charming 12-year-old girl will guide you through her temporary home: The Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. Zaatari is home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war, and children make up half the camp's population. In this lyrical VR film, Sidra leads you through her daily life: Eating, sleeping, learning and playing in the vast desert city of tents."

"Embed with Iraqi forces as they retake a city from ISIS – and experience the battle's aftermath."

"Shot from the perspective of people who live on the ground in Zambia, this 360-degree video provides a unique immersion into what it’s like to live there without adequate mobility, and the obstacles endured trying to navigate the country’s rugged terrain. But it also highlights one solution that is, quite literally, lifting people such as Emmanuel Chilufya off the ground."

"What’s it like to spend 23 hours a day in a cell measuring 6x9 feet for days, weeks, months or even years? 6x9 is the Guardian's first virtual reality experience, which places you inside a US solitary confinement prison cell and tells the story of the psychological damage that can ensue from isolation."


"Get an inside look at an infamous Japanese midget sub and experience a stirring Pearl Harbor reenactment."

By far, participants favored “Clouds Over Sidra” as a virtual reality story and experience. Participants felt they could relate to the main character and almost feel as though they were right next to her experiencing her daily challenges and triumphs as a refugee. The story was told using only the main character’s voice, with nearly zero text overlays or graphics. Participants did not react as favorably to the Pearl Harbor piece because many said it was a piece that could have been done as a traditional documentary, instead of a virtual reality experience. Participants also said the Zambia story was too much like a broadcast piece and “Project Syria” was too much like a video game.

“Two of the narratives, however, were not very engaging,” Dupree wrote in a Medium post. “I was happy when they were over. Zambia: Gift of Mobility and Pearl Harbor were not narratives that did well with ongoing engagement. Pearl Harbor felt like a museum piece and the storytelling, transitions, and commercials were not appealing to me. Zambia: Gift of Mobility felt a lot like a traditional broadcast piece. The 360 aspects looked like something the producers did as an afterthought.”

Coming full circle (360 degrees)
This small pilot study was to establish the methodology and test out technology with a small set of participants, so there’s more research to be done, and students want more of this type of applied learning. However, we came away with some tips to improve VR stories which correlate with core attributes to being mindful and fostering empathy.
  • STOP - This is not traditional filmmaking so stop trying to recreate what you can do in other mediums. Be open to what VR has the potential to be. You have this moment in time for the viewer to lose oneself and shift focus from real life -- take advantage of it by exploring all senses and not just what the eyes can see.
  • LOOK - Allow things to be what they are and let the sense of space speak for itself.  Don’t try to overproduce with different techniques or bells and whistles.  For the pilot participants, less is more but focusing in on making the details of your chosen media work best is important.
  • ACCEPT - Accept this reality and be in the moment to grab the viewer’s attention and turn this moment of empathy into compassion that’s long-lasting.  Without turning the experience into an advertisement with lots of pop ups, consider subtle triggers at the close during credits to extend viewer’s attention directly after the experience.

Tiffani learned many ways VR can be effective and will use
this knowledge in her future VR pieces she creates.
This pilot study gave students in the Advanced Journalism for Mobile and Emerging Platforms class the opportunity to look at virtual reality critically from a user experience point of view. They also were trained in 360 storytelling and were able to apply what they learned as audience members to their storytelling in the field. We hope this preliminary study will help others interested in VR storytelling to do the same.

“From viewing all these VR pieces, I have learned the many ways 360 and VR can be effective in telling a story and portraying aspects of a story that viewers were not able to experience before. I learned that if done correctly, a VR piece can really tell a powerful story or leave the viewer thinking about what they had just experienced,” Dupree wrote in a Medium post.

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Read the full “Headspace VR” report here.

For more Medium posts from the course, visit: https://medium.com/journalism-and-emerging-digital-innovation

Photo credits: Amara Aguilar

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Learnings from Design and Implementing Think & Do's this past year

So exciting news!  My colleagues, Susan Resnick West, Jake deGrazia and myself submitted a review of the Think & Do process to the MIX prize last year.  You can see our submission here.  If you recall, we were finalists of the prize last year; and the organization reached out to us to let us know that they thought our submission was still very relevant and re-submitted it for us.  Here's info on the prize.  

They gave us a day to add more information on what we've been doing to date since last year's with the hope we move to Phase 2 where we can improve the submission even more.  Fingers crossed!

So for your enjoyment, below is a reflection on the learnings we've gathered from running 9 Think & Do's since inception of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, the additional material we added to the MIX prize submission.  What's great about deadlines under pressure is it really has you focus and get things written down and its all great material for the ebook we're planning to release in the Fall.

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When we last posted, The Annenberg Innovation Lab was one and a half years into a lifetime adventure using the power of play to create networks of interdisciplinary collaborators. Our initial efforts have yielded our Think & Do process.  Over the past year, we have improved our execution but our fundamental process remains the same:
  • Ask Provocative Questions,
  • Invite Phenomenal Participants,
  • Create a stimulating Place,  
  • Get people together, mix it up, use Play and humor to flatten hierarchies and break down power barriers.
  • View innovation as a Process.  


Regular participation in our T&D Workshops is something we now consider a key benefit we provide our sponsors, among which are some of the world’s top media, entertainment, and technology companies. Over the three years we have been developing this process we have seen relationships grow across the media ecology amongst our sponsors, small media companies, our students, and faculty. Our process has also gained enough exposure that other companies and nonprofit organizations have asked us to personalize T&Ds for their networks. This increased interest has pushed us to start work on an e-workbook to be released Fall 2014. The book will further define our 5 Ps and offer a toolkit of activities that we hope will help people organize and facilitate their own Think & Dos. Since last January, we have honed our methods and thrown our nets wider, continuing our interdisciplinary work and expanding our process to help individual companies and organizations ideate and innovate.    


In the past year we have convened 2 additional cross disciplinary Think and Dos, focusing them on provocative questions related to the future of media and entertainment.


  1. Re-Envisioning the Home TV Experience: “Watching” and “Doing” TV Differently

  • Provocation: What defines the amplified experience of home television entertainment?
  • Participants included executives from the TV business and strategy side; creators and producers experimenting with content; user experience designers and developers; “wild cards” with an early appetite for reinventing, repackaging and enhancing the TV viewing experience; and USC professors, staff and students.
  • Everyone shared their best TV experience; mapped a typical 24-hours of viewing by a fictional TV viewer; discussed the shortfalls of our current home TV experiences; experimented with new technologies like Google Glass, Oculus Rift, 3D Printing and tablet experiences, to think about how these could add to or create new TV experience.
  • We came up with ideas like:
    • Enhancing a program with multiple points of view delivered to viewers through Google Glass (in development with prototype complete end of April 2014)
    • Using 3D-printed tangible artifacts to unlock extra content (in development with prototype complete end of April 2014)


  1. Business Models in an All-Mobile Environment

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  • Provocation: How can we create new business models for the media & entertainment sector to take advantage of an emerging all-mobile environment?
  • Participants included Media & Entertainment executives, “wild cards” and USC professors, staff and students.
  • Everyone shared the most interesting way they had used their mobile phone recently; brainstormed ways to address current business problems with emerging mobile solutions; refined those solutions by incorporating some core principles for creating value for business and the consumer.
  • We came up with an idea tentatively called “Janus,” to take audiences deep into a studio’s library through a recommendation system using both algorithms and celebrity content curation. The audience builds a community around content through social media, fan pages, and geolocations. (in development)


We believe the Information Economy is being replaced by a new Imagination Economy: a new global boom in which the rise of ubiquitous, natural, and affordable technology, the rise of participatory culture and the new “maker” movement, the rise of a global broadband distribution platform with 3.5 billion users, and the rise of a rapidly growing global middle class converge to reshape the media and entertainment industries—and quite possibly every other industry as well.


The two new Think & Do events mentioned above are part of our participatory design research agenda in how media and entertainment companies can reorient themselves to flourish in this emerging Imagination Economy.  By extending the Think and Do ideations into action, our approach responds to the challenge, “How can we tap into emerging digital technologies and the principles that undergird them (such as transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, open­ness, commu­nity and self-determination) to imagine the future of business?”  To extend the one-day experience we establish working groups and build on-going networks through social media. Since many of these people are not local,  technology today such as telepresence, skype and google hangout facilitate partticipant involvement.  


Projects Generated:
To date, our T&Ds have generated four new projects, all in various stages of completion:


1) Flotsam, a children’s transmedia play experience (PROTOTYPE consisting of an ebook, trading cards, game, and curriculum, a lab experiment conducted in the 1st quarter of 2013 to explore EXPANDING WHAT WE MEAN OF AN EBOOK PLATFORM)



2) A children’s pre-programmed second screen experience with DirecTV (completed in Spring 2012)

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3) Individualized daily news delivered by a personalized anchor (in development; CONCEPT PROTOTYPE EXPECTED SPRING 2014)Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 9.25.42 PM.png


4) A white paper focused on defining the field of transmedia branding  (publication released summer 2013 -- download here)


Expanded Think and Do Applications
In addition to the Think & Dos that we implemented as part of the Lab sponsors’ annual benefits, three organizations requested that we design and facilitate organization specific Think & Dos. Two of the three requests centered on transmedia branding, an expertise within our Lab, and the Director of the Arts Journalism program requested a Think & Do for a National Arts Journalism Summit.   We used our 5 Ps process to design these workshops which included:  


  • Transmedia Branding Think and Do for a major Clothing Manufacturer
    • Provocative question:  How do we connect the notion of “frontier” to global stories and spark a multicultural conversation amongst a new generation of consumers.   We asked the question, “How will this new generation pave their own definition of pioneering a new frontier–what does that mean to them?” “How can the company connect the campaign to their origin story.
    • Participants: 20 people including a few of the lab’s research fellows, members of the company’s value chain, as well as the creative team running the program.
    • We laid the groundwork for three key transmedia strategy pillars and brainstormed tangible deliverables.  These deliverables incorporated an awareness of a more globally inclusive world. By the end of the day, we had seeded a transmedia strategy for the brand campaign that impacted both the bottom line and global equity.


  • Transmedia Branding Think and Do for a Luxury Car Manufacturer
    • Provocation:  What are the branding and image challenges faced by this company?
    • Participants:  All levels of the company from full participation of the CEO, to the Creative Director, to the social media assistant.  Our goal was to create an equal creative playing field for all voices to contribute and feel as if their contribution mattered.
    • We ended the day with a draft transmedia brand map for the company to use as it further refined their campaign.


  • Future of the Arts Press


  • Provocation: How do we build a better arts press?
  • Participants: 64 artists, journalists, foundation executives, technologists, and entrepreneurs
  • Summary of the Day: We asked participants to share their first creative acts, discussed arts journalism's branding problem, used the Idealized Design process to identify the features of an ideal arts press, brainstormed projects that could deliver those features, and presented scopes of work and startup budgets for those projects
  • Scoped and budgeted projects included: a location-based mobile app focused on making notable art discoverable, a foundation-funded journalism organization focused on arts reporting for non-specialist audiences, and a storytelling framework for reporters trying to tell a single story from many different angles, in many different shapes and sizes, over many different distribution channels


Our core Think and Do team has now expanded, drawing in graduate students as well as faculty and sponsors.  While the teams sometimes operate independently we remain true to the interdisciplinary nature of a Think & Do.  A requirement for all our Think and Do’s is flexibilty and openess to include a wide range of stakeholders and colleagues as well as “wild card” participants that we bring into the process. In other words, we insist that our Think and Do’s “invert the pyramid and shift from the static value chain to value-creating networks.”



Lessons Learned:  
  • The importance of initial introductions. The opening introductions activity can be an incredibly effective community-building activity.  As a result, we have increased our emphasis on making intros memorable. With such a diverse group of people, creative introductions give everyone 45 seconds of fame: a moment to position and equalize before leaving egos behind. Think and Dos start with participants introducing themselves to the entire group by sharing a personal experience related to the day’s topic.  For example, at the Future of the Arts Press Think & Do, all participants introduced themselves by recollecting their first creative act. At New Business Models in an All Mobile Environment, participants shared their most novel use of a mobile device in the previous week. Some folks got unlost with geolocation and mapping; others found their cars; and still others used the device to downsize their possessions.
  • The power of Wild Cards, or people who seemingly don’t fit the model of other participants. For example, we invited a Red Bull executive to the Future of the Arts Press Think & Do.  We’ve found that people who don’t initially seem to belong in a room often very quickly help all the belongers see their problems and opportunities from important new angeles.
  • The importance of laying out the framework for the provocative question before folks arrive - Finding the right balance of enough but not too much information was the biggest learning process for the briefing books (many linked above in the different Think & Do’s we mention). The briefing book offers a place to curate and make explicit information that help formulate the provocative question that guides the day.
  • The need for a toolkit/framework for activities.  In order to scale, we need to move beyond our very small (3-5) team. After designing and implementing 9 Think & Do’s, we have begun to curate a variety of activities that can serve as templates.  Some of our best activities have been done multiple times, but no two are the same because each activity is a framing rather than a didactic lesson. A few examples include:
    • Character Sketch Trading Cards which give brief facts about stakeholders or consumers
    • Fishbowl Discussions happen in the middle of the room, unlike “expert panels” on stage, anyone can participate and members can freely tap in and out of the discussions.  This “model of engagement emphasizes the power of the individual over command and control”.
    • A Day in the Life creates a temporal understanding of how a product, process or policy impacts specific stakeholders.
  • The importance of FLIPping at the end of the day. FLIPing is Fast, Lean Implementation Planning. Without this activity, the energy of the day quickly dissipates, and people leave having enjoyed themselves but not having committed to staying involved in the “process” of innovation.


Over the past year, we have improved our execution but our fundamental process remains the same:
  • Ask Provocative Questions,
  • Invite Phenomenal Participants,
  • Create a stimulating Place,  
  • Get people together, mix it up, use Play and humor to flatten hierarchies and break down power barriers.
  • View innovation as a Process.  


Each Think & Do is a springboard into a process of innovation with impact.  The events are wonderful sparks, the challenge remains to fan the flame and maintain the networks beyond the one day event. We’re having some success and look forward to the communities feedback to move us to the next level of understanding this new way of working.

We look forward to your input and help as we continue to refine our process.