Solitary Confinement with VR

Obviously this may seem a boring concept at first, a VR experience walking round a cell, but from reading about this, I now take a whole new perspective.

Created by The Mill for The Guardian newspaper, this experience gives you the chance to begin to understand what 100,000 prisoners endure for 23 hours a day. Staring at the same 4 walls, no human interaction, that haunting claustrophobia, not even any colours to look at, so dull and lifeless.

To get the cell looking and feeling so real, The Mill worked with first person experiences to get accounts on the cell design and also the spatial atmosphere, with audio. Because of the fact that the cell design was powered by first person accounts, it makes it more poignant. The aspect that your looking round a room, that is so real to what so many people look at 23 hours a day, like your inside their memories.

In a way its like your in a documentary, this is showing how much VR is now changing our documentaries sculpting how we transfer information to the masses. Now, we don't need to describe in detail a place or an event, we can send them right there and let them experience it for themselves.

Carl Addy, The Mill creative director had this to say on the project; “Part of us trying to build empathy was to give a user agency; the ability to make choices and interact with the experience makes you invest emotionally in the narrative and outcome. VR puts you in the cell without any of the safety one gets from the detachment of a screen. This is not like watching a documentary, you are in it.”

The Mill, evidently from what Addy said, have set out to involve you in this experience and as a result, trigger emotions and bring empathy for those people. At the end of the day, solitary confinement is a punishment. That person has disobeyed the law, why should they deserve anything more? In some cases, they have given worse a torture to someone , so it's time for them to endure it themselves. It all comes down to themselves, its their fault they are in there, so why should we be made to feel sympathy? or more importantly, HOW can we feel empathy for such people? 

Carl Addy questions this himself;  “How do you build empathy around an issue as contentious as this?"

My answer is, you can't.

As much as this VR experience TRIES to make you feel it, for me, I can't feel sympathy for such people,  and why should I be made to feel. I can understand how people can even begin to feel empathy when the whole reason the people are in there, voids that completely. Would you feel empathy for what a mass murderer has to endure for the rest of their life? Given he ended so many others lives prematurely.
Overall, I love what The Mill have created, the opportunity to go inside a documentary basically, and experience first hand what it's like in a room for 23 hours, hearing those things, being in that atmosphere, which they have successfully achieved. It is just the empathy element that confuses me.