Soul Arcade
An immersive VR experience designed to foster empathy by connecting users with the stories of marginalized individuals | 2024 | Berkeley, CA
Team member: Alexx Zaki, Chuhua Ding, Takashi Xu, Shanna Finnigan and Miller Hollinger
Soul Arcade, an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience designed to foster empathy and understanding by connecting users with the stories of queer, neurodivergent, and other marginalized individuals. Soul Arcade hopes to create a shared emotional understanding between members of marginalized communities and to encourage greater awareness among those outside these communities through first-person, narrative-driven experiences. It explores the development, design, and impact of immersive storytelling in VR, highlighting its potential as a tool for empathy-building and social change. We describe the research methods, design process, and technological framework used to create Soul Arcade and discuss the broader implications of VR as a medium for inclusion and social impact. The following of the project provides both an overview of the project and guidelines for similar research within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
Background
In a diverse society, it’s crucial that everyone feels safe and welcomed, regardless of differences. Negative stereotypes about marginalized communities often stem from a lack of empathy, leading to discrimination and social isolation. This project seeks to foster understanding and inclusion for queer and neurodivergent individuals by immersing users in their stories through virtual reality (VR). By experiencing defining moments in these individuals' lives, users will gain insight into the challenges they face and the journey toward self-realization.
While VR's potential for social impact has been largely unexplored, it offers a unique level of immersion compared to traditional media. Museums, for example, are using VR and augmented reality (AR) to showcase artifacts in new ways, though these technologies often focus on physical interactions rather than emotional engagement. Our VR experience, built in Unity, aims to evoke emotional responses through storytelling and interaction. The experience is structured in scenes, each representing key moments in a queer individual’s coming-out journey, presented in first-person VR to enhance immersion and empathy.
Surveys of users and stakeholders will gauge the effectiveness of this approach in raising awareness and fostering empathy for marginalized communities. Stakeholder interviews have shaped the story to ensure an accurate representation of queer and neurodivergent experiences. We aim to confirm that users feel VR enhances their connection to the story and contributes to a deeper emotional response.
STORY DIAGRAM
Breakdown of the Soul Arcade narrative into four distinct sections.
Sketches
The experience is split into three major scenes, each representing a stage of a queer individual coming out.
Scene 1:
The first scene takes place in a child’s bedroom, filled with both toys labeled as for boys and girls. Each toy has an associated dialogue, which cause the protagonist to question their identity.
Scene 2:
The next scene places the protagonist in a hallway filled with doors on either side. Each door represents a situation that the protagonist is afraid to confront, and the protagonist is finally met with a mirror that reflects their own thoughts, setting the emotional tone.
Scene 3:
The final scene takes place in a dining room, surrounded by the protagonist’s family. The protagonist is forced to face their identity by the family. The setting of the room starts to fade away, leaving the protagonist in a dark space, towered over by their family. Finally, the room grows warm, and the protagonist is welcomed and accepted by their family.
Each scene contains interactions between the user and the environment, which form the foundation of immersing the user into the experience, and ultimately building an emotional connection.
Scenes
Participants begin the experience in Jordan’s childhood bedroom. The room is filled with toys, books, and items imbued with personal significance, serving as artifacts of their early life. Through interactive elements, participants can explore these objects, which trigger internal monologues voiced by Jordan. These thoughts are accompanied by subtitles for accessibility, ensuring inclusivity for participants with auditory challenges. The environment evokes nostalgia while hinting at the tension between innocence and growing self-awareness.
The participant transitions to a long, dimly lit hallway, lined with doors and mirrors. Behind each door lies a snippet of a conversation that Jordan dreads, reflecting moments of external judgment or misunderstanding. The mirrors, on the other hand, project Jordan’s internal struggles—self-doubt, fear, and moments of resolve. Participants must engage with these elements by listening to the conversations and confronting their reflection to progress to the next stage. The design emphasizes emotional tension, forcing participants to grapple with the weight of Jordan’s internal and external challenges.
The final scene places participants in a living room setting where Jordan must come out to their family. This interactive moment presents participants with three options at each stage of the conversation, simulating the complexity and emotional stakes of the scenario. The outcomes of these choices shape the dialogue and the atmosphere, ranging from support and relief to misunderstanding and tension. This scene is both universal and deeply personal, encapsulating the vulnerability and courage of the coming-out experience.
Here, the experience splits into two distinct outcomes:
The Negative Outcome: Participants make dialogue choices that lead to rejection, discomfort, or silence. The atmosphere darkens, the audio grows distant, and Jordan’s thoughts reflect the emotional weight of feeling misunderstood or rejected. This outcome conveys the isolation and vulnerability often faced in these pivotal moments.
The Positive Outcome: The narrative resets, offering participants a chance to experience a supportive and affirming version of the same conversation. The lighting softens, the family’s tone shifts to warmth and acceptance, and Jordan’s thoughts express relief and hope. This outcome highlights the profound impact of understanding and compassion.
Experiencing both scenarios creates a striking contrast, encouraging participants to reflect on how acceptance—or lack thereof—shapes an individual’s life and identity.
Demo Video
VR on User Experience
Across a number of the studies referenced, sensory immersion remained a key factor for fully harnessing the strengths of Virtual Reality.
We have included visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation to maximize sensory input in our storytelling (to the degree that VR is capable of)
By broadening the interaction beyond just a digital screen, as is traditionally seen in digital media, this project aims to deepen a sense of emotional closeness.
Soul Arcade as an empathy-building platform aligns with some of the most common use cases for VR . We use the concrete scenes to increase the immersion of the experience, reducing external distractions and allowing the user to fully participate in each scene to enhance engagement and retention.
Limitations of VR
While at face value, VR has proven to increase a sense of empathy and connection, it is possible that virtual reality can detrimentally impact an individual’s social views, leading to moral issues.
We used the findings from this paper to keep in mind best practices when building our experience to ensure that users are left with a positive impact.
Virtual reality has limitations and may not fully capture the intricacies of real-life situations, as stated in [3]. This was kept in consideration through a participatory design process.
Virtual Reality applications are known to cause users nausea and discomfort, potentially through an unrealistic mapping of the real world to the virtual world.
As per [2], we have implemented perception-aware design throughout our process, taking into account how users perceive space, depth, and motion in virtual environments.