Humanitarian VR as 360° Autopsy: Empathy and Sympathy in Immersive Storytelling

The article aims to analyse some experiences of digital and virtual storytelling that have been designed to raise public awareness on the migrant emergency by using “immersive strategies” to enhance its visualization and elicit empathy. The assumption of immersive media, most of all virtual reality, is that a process of immersion fostering an individual role can promote a face to face contact and incorporation of the users in the life of the victims. While VR storytelling is still seeking a narrative form fully correspondent to its technological potential beyond the mere “being there”, its “dispositif” – in the sense of the entanglement between a technical apparatus revolving around a 360° “autopsy” and the related ideological discourses – is here critically deconstructed in its being polarised between an empathy catalyser and a trigger for sympathy.