Evaluating Empathy in Realistic and Non-Photorealistic Virtual Reality Museum Experiences Using Eye Tracking

In recent decades, the focus of museums shifted from displaying objects to communicating ideas. Virtual Reality (VR) presents the opportunity to engage museum visitors with the heritage content to develop empathy. An empathic connection in VR is able to spread awareness and illustrate the different perceptions regarding a phenomenon. The studies indicate that immersive virtual experiences result in variable levels of empathy depending on the communication media and levels of realism. However, most of these studies were evaluated using self-reporting and physiological tracking measures which may be prone to bias. Therefore, this research investigates how empathy can be measured using eye tracking integrated into a VR headset as a physiological data collection complementing psychological surveys. The study also aims to explore how different levels of realism affect user empathic concern and perspective-taking in a museum context. As a case study, the manufacturing heritage of the post-industrial city of Geelong in Australia is used to explore how empathy can be developed towards the engineering sector. The preliminary results of the community and stakeholder surveys show that due to limited exposure to advanced manufacturing initiatives, many locals still perceive engineering in a traditional way as “dirty” and “noisy”.