Project description
Somebodyelse creates embodied experiences in VR to help people to understand an issue in an immersive, educational and playful way to raise awareness and enable positive behavioural change. In 2015, the United Nations all agreed on 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which are part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. But social, cultural, and environmental problems still seem to be accumulating worldwide; sustainable cities and communities, access to health and therapy, or social wellbeing are still huge problems to tackle. People are still not sufficiently aware of the underlying problems, cannot understand, imagine, or relate to them, and therefore, will not change them either. Digital technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) allow a wide range of people to experience abstract content appealingly. And, today we know that people can better understand and emphasize through a self-made bodily experience.
We contribute to these topics through our innovative approach with Embodied Experiences, where we let people experience a different perspective. Using methods of Biomimicry, we create a virtual copy of our world, in which we visualize unseen and unperceivable phenomena in our world. Through VR, we make abstract contents tangible in a multi-sensory and -modal way. This allows us to sensitize our users to meaningful topics, and eventually engage a discourse or action to solve complex social challenges.
Based on our Pilot Product BATVISION, where people can discover the perspective of a bat in an urban environment, we are transferring our approach to further issues. We aim to evolve from a product within edutainment into a tool that can be used in recurring use cases in the areas of experiential learning, providing therapy or improving social communication. We want to explore this potential and create the basis for future applications in areas such as wellbeing, digital education or health management.
What is special about the project?
We have found a method in VR to create a unique change of perspective that helps people in social challenges. By embodying a character related to a social challenge, we aim to trigger empathy. This embodied, empathetic experience creates awareness of the problem which, in the best case, is changing people's behaviour. Through abstraction and multimodal interaction, the experience provides a simple and understandable approach to complex topics. In VR, people can immerse and explore a virtual world. When we feel and experience something with our own bodies, it has a deeper emotional impact, which in turn significantly increases the likelihood of behavioural change in the user. This makes us aware of our subjective perception and helps to reflect on our impact as human beings. As a company, we are striving to bring new technologies and new ways of conveying information into more use cases, and explore the potentials of embodied experiences in meaningful areas.
Status/Results
Since the launch in January 2021, we were able to test our pilot project on six customer pilots in the second half of the year. We were able to improve usability, intuitiveness and interactions. The pilot product is currently in the final phase and will be released in Q1 in Switzerland and Germany. The next project on the topic of spider-phobia was validated with experts and a partnership with a masters student in the field of edutainment was established. The focus for the next six months is to build up a customer and partner network for our long-term plan and to refine our vision to find up to two further use cases.
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Persons involved in the project
Last update to this project presentation 28.04.2022