When we got this assignment, my initial thoughts were something along the lines of “well damn that sounds like a lot of work”. I have never written an essay as long as this one despite going to a english focussed school for my entire student life. We just never wrote essays like this, the maximum number of words we were asked to write was 500 and that too on topics such as short stories.
I eventually started thinking about essay topics and what could my 500-word-essay brain come up with. In one of the lectures, our course leader, David, mentioned Mel Slater who questioned how it was possible to create vr environments such that people responded realistically and what was the psychological reason behind it. After an hour of research, I came across this websit https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781884/. Even though it was a promising topic, I could already hear David go, “I think the topic is too broad’ resulting in me doing further research anyway so I tried to steer away from it but somehow ended up going to a similiar direction though, and thought about doing it on Virtual reality’s effects on social empathy and behaviour. It was my first actual topic and the essay was starting to form. Ofcourse it wasn’t that easy, I had definitely thought that my topic was focussed enough, it only talked about two paticular things, and I was wrong but that was revealed later. Initially happy with my topic, I started my research slowly and spent about an hour a day. It’s things like these that result in me doing everything last minute.
The first resourse I found was a book called the Social Handbook of Psychology in the form of a pdf because who would actually buy a book. I couldnt find it on the uni library website too. I was sure I had hit the jackpot but also knew I needed atleast 5 resources in total. I read a few pages of the book mentioning social psychology and how its applied and affected in VR and I was ecstatic. It talked about presence in VR and how that is the basic factor that affects everything related to psychology of the human mind. I started writing. What I didnt realise was that my essay had begun to gravitate specifically towards the idea of presence when I had to talk about socia empathy and behaviour.
I researched more and the more journals and articles I’d found, I realised they all mentioned the effects of presence
After writing my first draft, which was a mere 500 words, my capacity, I showed it to David and here was when it was revealed that the topic infact was still not focussed enough. He advised me to dive deeper into the topic of presence. That evening, I sat for 4 hours straight and found around 8 resouces talking about presence in VR. I still wanted to stick to my original idea of empathy as psychology was something I was always interested in. Its probably in the family, seeing that both my parents are life coaches. The idea to induce empathy in VR and how the different levels of presence in VR changed the result of the experience, intrigued me. Thus formed my essay topic, Empathy in Virtual reality: How does the role of presence create understanding and compassion.
Now that my topic was finalised, I started increasing my research hours at home. I came across a few names multiple times, Mel slater and Jeremy Bailenson were two of them. I have used many of their resources. I started researching specifically by using their name and found other people who had worked with them or had worked in a similar area which helped me gather all my resources. ‘
I gathered around 15 resources which I deemed enough for my sense of satisfaction and actually started writing the essay. Some were useful and some weren’t. Starting with an introduction about empathy in VR, I talked about Edward Titchener’s definition and how empathy meant understanding another’s emotions and connecting with them at a deeper level. Then had my literature review on importance of presence and cited as many references as I could, had a duscussion about the pros and cons of using Vr to generate empathy and finally concluded buy talking about VR’s potential for the future. I remember that the more resources I found, the more hopeful I got and the more closer the essay became to its completion. I came across many papers and journals which had no relevance to my topic, but I just sat and read them wasting time like I normally would, but this time, instead of watching a show, I was reading someones work and gaining knowledge, which I found very fascinating because that wouldnt be something I would ever do. One such paper was The Psychology of Art by Lev Semenovich Vygotsky taken from The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
The resources I actually used varied from topics such as meta-analysis’ about immersion, empathy enhancement in VR and gaming addiction to name a few.
Looking back at this essay, something that I deemed impossible to do, it actually turned out to be super informative in multiple ways. I learnt about several pioneers of VR, figured out the harvard referenciong sytem everyone went on about and finally, wrote an essay that I couldve only dreamed to write. It may seem as an exaggeration, but I’m not joking. This was a challenging but enlightening experience. Through this process, I gained valuable insights into my topic and developed my research and writing skills. It also taught me the importance of perseverance and discipline, as well as the value of seeking feedback from others and incorporating it into my work. You could say the experience proved to be a valuable opportunity for my growth and development. Never knew something I considered boring like writing an essay could actually turn out to be so much fun but Im glad it did.