How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine

Chris Milk uses cutting edge technology to produce astonishing films that delight and enchant. But for Milk, the human story is the driving force behind everything he does. In this short, charming talk, he shows some of his collaborations with musicians including Kanye West and Arcade Fire, and describes his latest, mind-bending experiments with virtual reality.

Virtual reality started for me
in sort of an unusual place.

It was the 1970s.

I got into the field very young:
I was seven years old.

And the tool that I used
to access virtual reality

was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle.

This is a commercial for
that particular item:

(Video) Voice-over: What a jump!

Evel's riding the amazing stunt cycle.

That gyro-power sends him
over 100 feet at top speed.

Chris Milk: So this was my joy back then.

I rode this motorcycle everywhere.

And I was there with Evel Knievel; we
jumped the Snake River Canyon together.

I wanted the rocket.

I never got the rocket,
I only got the motorcycle.

I felt so connected to this world.

I didn't want to be a storyteller
when I grew up, I wanted to be stuntman.

I was there. Evel Knievel was my friend.

I had so much empathy for him.

But it didn't work out. (Laughter)

I went to art school.

I started making music videos.

And this is one of the early
music videos that I made:

(Music: "Touch the Sky" by Kanye West)

CM: You may notice
some slight similarities here.

(Laughter)

And I got that rocket.

(Laughter)

So, now I'm a filmmaker,
or, the beginning of a filmmaker,

and I started using the tools that are
available to me as a filmmaker

to try to tell the most compelling stories
that I can to an audience.

And film is this incredible medium
that allows us to feel empathy

for people that are very different than us

and worlds completely
foreign from our own.

Unfortunately,

Evel Knievel did not feel the same
empathy for us that we felt for him,

and he sued us for this video --

(Laughter) --

shortly thereafter.

On the upside, the man
that I worshipped as a child,

the man that I wanted
to become as an adult,

I was finally able to get his autograph.

(Applause)

Let's talk about film now.

Film, it's an incredible medium,

but essentially, it's the same
now as it was then.

It's a group of rectangles that are
played in a sequence.

And we've done incredible things
with those rectangles.

But I started thinking about,

is there a way that I can use modern
and developing technologies

to tell stories in different ways

and tell different kinds of stories

that maybe I couldn't tell using
the traditional tools of filmmaking

that we've been using for 100 years?

So I started experimenting,

and what I was trying to do was
to build the ultimate empathy machine.

And here's one of the early experiments:

(Music)

So this is called
"The Wilderness Downtown."

It was a collaboration with Arcade Fire.

It asked you to put in the address
where you grew up at the beginning of it.

It's a website.

And out of it starts growing these little
boxes with different browser windows.

And you see this teenager
running down a street,

and then you see Google Street View
and Google Maps imagery

and you realize the street
he's running down is yours.

And when he stops in front of a house,
he stops in front of your house.

And this was great, and I saw people
having an even deeper emotional reaction

to this than the things that
I had made in rectangles.

And I'm essentially taking
a piece of your history

and putting it inside
the framing of the story.

But then I started thinking,

okay, well that's a part of you,

but how do I put all of you
inside of the frame?

So to do that, I started
making art installations.

And this is one called
"The Treachery of Sanctuary."

It's a triptych. I'm going to show
you the third panel.

(Music)

So now I've got you inside of the frame,

and I saw people having even more
visceral emotional reactions

to this work than the previous one.

But then I started thinking about frames,
and what do they represent?

And a frame is just a window.

I mean, all the media that we watch --
television, cinema --

they're these windows into
these other worlds.

And I thought, well, great.
I got you in a frame.

But I don't want you in the frame,
I don't want you in the window,

I want you through the window,
I want you on the other side,

in the world, inhabiting the world.

So that leads me back to virtual reality.

Let's talk about virtual reality.

Unfortunately,

talking about virtual reality
is like dancing about architecture.

And this is actually someone dancing
about architecture in virtual reality.

(Laughter)

So, it's difficult to explain.
Why is it difficult to explain?

It's difficult because it's a very
experiential medium.

You feel your way inside of it.

It's a machine, but inside of it,

it feels like real life,
it feels like truth.

And you feel present in the world
that you're inside

and you feel present with the people
that you're inside of it with.

So, I'm going to show you a demo
of a virtual reality film:

a full-screen version of
all the information

that we capture when
we shoot virtual reality.

So we're shooting in every direction.

This is a camera system that we built

that has 3D cameras that look
in every direction

and binaural microphones
that face in every direction.

We take this and we build, basically,
a sphere of a world that you inhabit.

So what I'm going to show you
is not a view into the world,

it's basically the whole world
stretched into a rectangle.

So this film is called
"Clouds Over Sidra,"

and it was made in conjunction with
our virtual reality company called VRSE

and the United Nations,

and a co-collaborator named Gabo Arora.

And we went to a Syrian refugee camp
in Jordan in December

and shot the story of a 12-year-old
girl there named Sidra.

And she and her family fled Syria
through the desert into Jordan

and she's been living in this
camp for the last year and a half.

(Video) Sidra: My name is Sidra.

I am 12 years old.

I am in the fifth grade.

I am from Syria,
in the Daraa Province, Inkhil City.

I have lived here in the Zaatari camp
in Jordan for the last year and a half.

I have a big family:

three brothers, one is a baby.

He cries a lot.

I asked my father if I cried when
I was a baby and he says I did not.

I think I was a stronger baby
than my brother.

CM: So, when you're inside
of the headset.

you're not seeing it like this.

You're looking around through this world.

You'll notice you see full
360 degrees, in all directions.

And when you're sitting there
in her room, watching her,

you're not watching it through
a television screen,

you're not watching it through a window,
you're sitting there with her.

When you look down, you're sitting
on the same ground that she's sitting on.

And because of that,

you feel her humanity in a deeper way.

You empathize with her in a deeper way.

And I think that we can change
minds with this machine.

And we've already started
to try to change a few.

So we took this film to the World Economic
Forum in Davos in January.

And we showed it to a group of people

whose decisions affect the lives
of millions of people.

And these are people
who might not otherwise

be sitting in a tent
in a refugee camp in Jordan.

But in January, one afternoon
in Switzerland,

they suddenly all found themselves there.

(Applause)

And they were affected by it.

So we're going to make more of them.

We're working with the
United Nations right now

to shoot a whole series of these films.

We just finished shooting
a story in Liberia.

And now, we're going
to shoot a story in India.

And we're taking these films,

and we're showing them
at the United Nations

to people that work there and people
that are visiting there.

And we're showing
them to the people

that can actually change the lives
of the people inside of the films.

And that's where I think we just
start to scratch the surface

of the true power of virtual reality.

It's not a video game peripheral.

It connects humans to other humans
in a profound way

that I've never seen before
in any other form of media.

And it can change people's
perception of each other.

And that's how I think

virtual reality has the potential
to actually change the world.

So, it's a machine,

but through this machine
we become more compassionate,

we become more empathetic,
and we become more connected.

And ultimately, we become more human.

Thank you.

(Applause)