Evoking empathy with visually impaired people through an augmented reality embodiment experience

TL;DR

This study presents a multi-sensory augmented reality experience that temporarily immerses sighted users in a visual impairment scenario, significantly increasing their empathy towards visually impaired individuals and informing assistive technology development.

Contribution

It introduces a novel embodied AR experience for empathy evocation and provides empirical evidence of its effectiveness in enhancing empathy among sighted users.

Findings

Sighted participants' empathy increased after the experience.

BVI community sees potential for new assistive tech development.

The method effectively evokes empathy through multi-sensory interaction.

Abstract

To promote empathy with people that have disabilities, we propose a multi-sensory interactive experience that allows sighted users to embody having a visual impairment whilst using assistive technologies. The experiment involves blindfolded sighted participants interacting with a variety of sonification methods in order to locate targets and place objects in a real kitchen environment. Prior to the tests, we enquired about the perceived benefits of increasing said empathy from the blind and visually impaired (BVI) community. To test empathy, we adapted an Empathy and Sympathy Response scale to gather sighted people's self-reported and perceived empathy with the BVI community from both sighted (N = 77) and BVI people (N = 20) respectively. We re-tested sighted people's empathy after the experiment and found that their empathetic and sympathetic responses (N = 15) significantly increased. Furthermore, survey results suggest that the BVI community believes the use of these empathy-evoking embodied experiences may lead to the development of new assistive technologies.