In August 2023, a series of co-design workshops were run in a collaboration between Kyushu University (Fukuoka, Japan), the Royal College of Art (London, UK), and Imperial College London (London, UK). In this series of workshops, participants were asked to create a number of drawings visualising avian-human interaction scenarios. Each set of drawings demonstrated a specific interaction each participant had with an avian species in three different contexts: the interaction from the participants perspective, the interaction from the birds perspective, and how the participant hopes interaction will be embodied in 50 years' time. The main purpose of this exercise was to co-imagine a utopian future with more positive interspecies relations between humans and birds. Based on these drawings, we have created a number of visualisations presenting those perspectives in Virtual Reality. This development allows viewers to visualise participants' perspective shifts through the subject matter depicted in their workshop drawings, allowing for the observation of the relationship between humans and non-humans (here: avian species). This research tests the hypothesis that participants perceive Virtual Reality as furthering their feelings of immersion relating to the workshop topic of human-avian relationships. This demonstrates the potential of XR technologies as a medium for building empathy towards non-human species, providing foundational justification for this body of work to progress into employing XR as a medium for perspective shifts.
Tori Simpson, Harry Hosker, Tokushu Inamura, Yasuyuki Hirai, Bjorn Sommer, "VR Visualization of Interspecies Relationships For Co-Design Practices Supporting Empathy Building and Perspective Shifts" in Electronic Imaging, 2024, pp 355-1 - 355-7, https://doi.org/10.2352/EI.2024.36.2.SDA-355