Enter the Virtual Reality World of Planned Parenthood Stephanie Castillo - Newsweek
go to original July 7, 2016

"Across the Line" is an immersive virtual reality experience that puts the audience on scene as anti-abortion extremists try to intimidate patients who seek sexual and reproductive health care. (Planned Parenthood)

When Planned Parenthood first invited me to see its virtual reality film Across the Line, I thought the focus would be on the many hurdles women face seeking reproductive health care in Mexico. The line in the title could have been the U.S.-Mexico border - Mexico has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world.

But when I don the goggles, I instead find myself inside a clinic in the United States. Off to one side - the view is 360 degrees - is Dr. Raegan McDonald-Mosley, chief medical officer of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, comforting a visibly shaken patient named Christina who, it seems, has just walked through an anti-abortion protest outside. These are real women, not actors, re-enacting the experience of verbal harassment the organization’s employees and patients routinely endure on the way to a clinic’s front door.

...Until recently, VR has almost exclusively been associated with video games. Some research suggests that the technology makes violent video games damagingly realistic, and the intense death and violence increases a player’s risk of becoming anti-social, aggressive and less empathetic. But a 2015 study on nonviolent video games found that being immersed in a virtual world is not unlike diving into a great story - players are transported to other times and spaces feel as if they’re going on a real journey, making it easier to relate to the protagonist's fate.

The more players engaged with the narration in nonviolent games, the more meaningful choices and relationships they made. This suggests that in the right context, immersive VR can positively affect a person’s theory of mind - the cognitive ability to take on different perspectives and assess other people's emotions, beliefs, hopes and intentions. Researchers are excited about VR’s potential as a tool to help treat clinical disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, which are thought to be connected to a lack of empathy.

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