The Social Impact Goal

Those who have a vested interest in the arts are often curious: how is art impacting its audiences? The Americans for the Arts Arts + Social Impact Explorer presents ten categories for how art can impact the people in its communities, and it is the ultimate challenge of arts organizations to build innovative programs that improve their reach in all ten. To measure impact against this challenge, organizations may analyze ticket sales, subscriptions, donations, and audience surveys. Between income spreadsheet lines, however, there are more questions about how to improve engagement, and – central to this piece – when and how to incorporate new technologies into classic offerings to boost innovation.

While art’s impact on society cannot be precisely measured, its applications can be used in novel technology as a signal for its direction in our modern world. Virtual Reality (VR) technology is one of these technologies that can be leveraged. VR developers and artists have grown increasingly collaborative in building creative immersive experiences over the past two decades. Meta, formerly Facebook, recently committed to investing $10 billion dollars in VR development in the next year. In light of this massive VR endorsement, this article in VentureBeat explores how art can positively impact health and wellbeing, civic dialogue, and community development when paired with VR technology and art therapy foundations.

“Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.” - Stephen Sondheim

The Market for Creative VR Has Expanded

VR is most readily associated with gaming in the public domain. Action, adventure, fighting, and combat games are popularly developed within the VR gaming community. However, there is a lot of buzz in the media currently about how VR can impact society outside of providing video-game-type entertainment. The 2020 Augmented and Virtual Reality Survey Report found that the growth of VR will most likely impact the healthcare and education industries most. VR applications are extremely flexible in their building structure, as they have been customized to simulate surgeries for doctors in training, and even Black Friday shoppers to prepare Walmart employees for the biggest shopping day of the year.

Meta’s massive commitment to VR development is a means to bold end: building what it calls the “metaverse” and filling it with everything we recognize in our daily lives and more. The metaverse is still very much in its development phase, but its eventual appeal is set to be a virtual world, much like our physical world, where one can navigate work, social, fitness, and commerce. Meta has already begun releasing VR applications on its Oculus Quest 2 that fit these categories so users get exposed to what a world of working or exercising in a 360 virtual landscape would look and feel like. According to a recent YouTube data scrape, the public is focusing on the headset, feel, excitement, and “how-tos” of these experiences so far.

There are many unknowns in terms of where VR will lead for the average consumer and many conversations to be had about the value of in-person versus virtual experiences that arise from the technology’s further development. Forbes recommends that everyone invest in the metaverse, while some are not so sure that it will catch on. Tom Corbett, a specialty faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) likened the current state of the metaverse to where the internet was in the late 1990s when email and limited forums were all the web could provide. “There’s still not a lot to do [in the metaverse], and there’s so much we don’t know about where it is going to go yet,” he says.

Though we are still far from a time when everyone is using VR, promising insights in the realms of art and storytelling in VR indicate how the technology is making an impact on public health and civic dialogue today, and how it can expand this impact in the future. The release of the Oculus Quest 2 in the fall of 2021 was monumental because it marked the most inexpensive VR headset release yet. Consumers can now purchase the headset for $300, and a Facebook account of course. For reference, when VR simulations were first used for trauma related therapy in the early 2000s, clinicians could only get their hands on the technology for the steep price of $25,000. The physical weight of the technology apparatus at the time was a hefty 10 pounds, compared to the Quest’s 1.1 pounds.

Meta now offers an entire category of art and creative applications on its website at the cheapest these types of apps have ever been. The opportunity to experience Meta’s creative endeavors, movies and narratives, and relaxing experiences are less expensive than their action-based applications on average. In the vein of creative and relaxing experiences, labs around the world are building applications to target specific social problems, using storytelling and communication to fuel them. For example, one of the applications that Tom worked on at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center involved creating culturally calming spaces for international students longing for the feeling of home. Riffing off of serene space building in VR, another team at ETC is working on an art therapy application in VR called Impression, which will provide the general public with an immersive and accessible alternative to traditional talk therapy. According to the application’s producer, Lauren Zhang, Impression aims to make practical uses of VR comfortable and intuitive, and make users believe that they can “put on a headset and not be overwhelmed.” The field of art therapy provides a great example of art’s impact on our world, and investing in art therapy in VR exemplifies how the technology can be used to increase art’s reach for social good.  

Art Therapy in VR: A Model for Future Social Impact

Art was first studied as a therapeutic practice in 1958 by two scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A few takeaways from research in the field of art therapy are that art-making fosters self-expression, relieves stress, promotes productive conversations toward healing, and aids memory recognition. A common activity in art therapy sessions is for a trained art therapist to prompt clients to draw images of life events and themes. For the first few decades of art therapy’s existence, this was done primarily with paper and pens or other writing utensils. Then, an interesting convergence began to take shape with VR technology.

 VR created its own genre of therapy in the late 1990s when the military realized they could program and control combat exposure therapy simulations for Vietnam War veterans suffering from PTSD. Ultimately, scientists believe that using customized VR experiences as exposure therapy assists PTSD patients because its immersive imagery helps unlock memories buried in the brain as a symptom of the disorder. Since this effect is similar to that of art therapy, which uses the image-making process to elicit conversation and progress toward healing, the opportunity for VR to augment the art therapy experience emerged.

In 2021, Drexel University concluded that painting within Tilt Brush, a VR application that provides a myriad of canvases and colors, calms the body by lowering prefrontal cortex activity. Art therapists have piloted using Tilt Brush in their therapy sessions to compare it to their 1:1 material methods as well, and they currently believe that the technology could serve general and social anxiety, eating disorder, and PTSD patients similar to traditional art therapy. In fact, they hypothesize that art therapy in VR may promote creative expression more successfully than traditional art therapy for introverted individuals. When using Tilt Brush in therapy sessions on adolescent youth, therapists also hypothesized that the technology could help individuals who do not believe they are particularly imaginative surpass the fear of making mistakes.

Lauren stressed the importance of VR’s novelty when discussing her team’s work while building Impression. The newness of drawing in a dimension beyond paper and pen is exciting for first-time users, the team has found. When entering the world of Impression, the client is immediately teleported (the technical term for movement in VR) into a tranquil building where they stand, looking out through wall to wall, panoramic glass windows at an expansive view of trees. This initial space is the “waiting room” that the team designed based upon research and conversations with art therapists. An immediate feeling of calm emanates from this environment, and although heightened by the novelty of the space, the potential for the experience to be enchanting is undeniable. Once a client meets their therapist in the virtual space, they follow them via teleportation to an art studio room equally enveloped in the serene landscape of tall trees and beautiful outdoor views to choose a canvas. The application gives control to the therapist over the feng shui of this art studio so they can cater its contents to fit individual client’s needs.

Impression’s audience is those with low severity mental health needs, and since anxiety and depression percentages have risen dramatically since the start of COVID-19, the technology could potentially boost art therapy to be as commonplace as iOS applications like BetterHelp. VR applications these days are bred to be social, so the application also allows clients and therapists to converse about the art-making process. Therapists can even host group therapy sessions in the tool to unite clients from anywhere in the world, as long as they have a VR headset. Applications like Impression shed light on the ways immersive technology and art can be combined for social good on an individual and collective level, thus touching upon the social impact points of health, wellbeing, and community development. Below are a few additional examples of how art and VR can merge for social impact.

Figure 5: Thomas Wrabetz, a developer on the Impression team, plays the role of a therapist in the application and observes two side-by-side client drawings (Left.) Thomas uses the built-in “Therapist Watch” to facilitate the experience (Right).

Other Art-Making Options in VR

Exciting Developments

The Impression team architected their virtual world such that therapists could use art as was uniquely applicable to each client for mental health treatment. Museums have also collaborated with VR developers to build applications suited for their specific educational missions. Some inspiring examples include the V&A’s Curious Alice: The VR Experience and VIVE Arts’  Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass. Other projects, like Homeless Realities, have framed VR as an empathy-rich platform for storytelling.

The creators of Homeless Realities worked with the homeless population in Los Angeles to document the world from their eyes in an immersive VR fashion; its producers see its impact as part of a much larger JOVRNALISM movement. Our America is an interactive and autobiographical depiction of life as a Black male getting pulled over by law enforcement in the United States, and it is another powerful installment in this immersive storytelling genre. Art organizations with the means to do so may consider developing and showcasing stories with and to their communities through VR to lift their audience’s voices and increase local cross-cultural and identity understanding. However, most organizations will not have the funding to support custom VR developments. In this case, there are multiple ways for organizations to utilize already existing applications for community building in VR. 

Existing Applications

Visual Arts

Painting in VR is accessible in Tilt Brush and Color Space for the Oculus Quest for single users, and multiple painting applications are in development for multiplayer use. A benefit to society of users participating in single player visual art applications is that that they get the chance to enter into a creative and uber-focused “flow state” in these environments. Meanwhile, a multi-player drawing club in VR could promote story sharing through the art-making process. Since the Oculus Quest is equipped with chat features, multiplayer art-making programs could facilitate connections with members of varying life experiences around the world. This use of VR could also work for collaborative art-making projects and competitions based on relevant social issues, achieving art’s civic dialogue social impact component.

The Performing Arts

Tender Claws, an independent game design group, created a free Oculus application called The Under Presents where performing artists have used VR to create wild, silly, and dream-like stories. To stay relevant to the themes of collaboration and community in the virtual world, this application, and other live theater in VR experiences like it, allows actors to engage with audience members during their adventures. As The Under Presents website states, the productions ensure that “the line between real and virtual, and truth and fiction, blurs.” Benefits of live theater VR applications for arts organizations could be bringing performing arts lovers together for a low commitment, entertaining activity and promoting civic dialogue through virtual storytelling for the community.

Drawbacks to Using VR

When considering investing into VR at its current state in 2021, it is important to note its technical and experiential limitations. The most frequently mentioned downside of VR experiences during testing is their overwhelming nature. It is common for VR users to need a break from the technology after about 30 minutes because of its monopolization over the human senses. Additionally, depending on a variety of factors, VR experiences can be nausea-inducing. Organizations should note that it is difficult to predict who will experience a these side-effects while using VR technology, so first-time users must always proceed with caution. Tom Corbett believes that VR will likely suffer challenges of being widely adopted until more comfortable, wearable augmented reality (AR) becomes readily available, but this will take at least a few years.

VR is still prone to technical glitches and lags since many of its applications are still incredibly new. Also, Meta’s idealistic image of a metaverse will need to take a backseat until headsets can last longer than a few hours without a charge. In addition to technological limitations, VR still needs much improvement from a graphical perspective. Lauren expressed concern about this during the development of Impression, stating that there are certain things, like the textured feeling of a paint-brush stroke, that developers cannot precisely imitate with the technology at this point in its advancement.

Conclusions

A major takeaway from this review of art’s social impact potential with VR is that art-making and  storytelling VR applications are prevalent and accessible in the market now, as events like Meta’s push for the metaverse continue to accelerate immersive experience development. Art therapy in VR provides a great case for how the technology can use art to impact the health and well-being of communities. Outside of the clinical setting, there are a growing number of ways to build impactful works using VR and artistic practices through already existing VR applications or extremely individualized development opportunities. Despite technical and graphical shortcomings of VR, it has the potential to combine with the arts to enhance the creative and connective experiences of society, acting as a catalyst for civic dialogue and community development.