Design Strategies for Creating Empathy-Arousing VR Warfare Content Across Various Demographic Groups and levels of VR Experience

This study explores how VR can enhance audience empathy towards war-related topics, as well as the variation in empathy enhancement among demographics. The research involved interviewing 6 participants aged 20 to 40 with varying levels of knowledge in VR experience, including audiences without VR creation experience, VR content creators, and VR expert scholars. The results indicate that audiences without VR creation experience place more emphasis on self-projection and immersion in the narrative. VR content creators, on the other hand, focus on the verisimilitude of the mediated world and interaction mechanisms within, while VR expert scholars prioritize the sense of agency and multisensory stimulation. Therefore, we categorize them into ‘Embodied Needs,’ ‘Visceral Needs,’ and ‘Agential Needs,’ suggesting that audiences have incremental expectations depending on their proficiency in VR experience, and their empathetic responses evolve from subjective acknowledgment to affective involvement. Hopefully, our findings provide guidance for crafting empathy-arousing contents to reach a wider audience.