XR, Imagination Labs and the Mental Poverty Trap.
What happens when you take VR into a slum?
As a VR enthusiast, I’ve been long searching for my Chaplin moment with the medium. It’s fun, it’s interesting but many times I create something and end up asking myself, ‘OK, so what?’
This year, I’ve had the privilege of being a Walt Disney Imagineer, working as a researcher and interaction designer. It was a dream come true. Once upon a time, the idea that I could work in Disney, coming all the way from Kenya felt like an impossibility and yet here I was! One of the greatest lessons working at this company has been the understanding that our Guest Experience is the final product. That experience includes happiness, imagination and the freedom to dream. I loved that.
Trending AR VR Articles:
1. Ready Player One : How Close Are We?
2. Augmented Reality — with React-Native
3. Five Augmented Reality Uses That Solve Real-Life Problems
4. Virtual Reality Headsets: What are the Options? Which is Right For You?
For all intents and purposes, WDI is a construction company. The amount of work, money and time that goes into a single attraction is enormous and I learned that first hand. At the MIT Media Lab, my research project allo-i, looks designs for experiential entertainment in developing countries within Africa. Seeing Disney Land in Anaheim was a little bit disheartening. I felt in an instant that there was simply no way that something of this magnitude could be feasible in Kenya (not just yet, anyway). Nevertheless, could the same feeling and experience be achieved without spending millions of dollars?
I see the imagination as a functional superpower in children all over the world and, extensive research shows that the capacity to imagine is typically linked with better futures (Agee et al. 2012). Unfortunately, most of this research has been done on WEIRD societies (Western/White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) while the study of imagination, both neurologically, philosophically and psychologically, is practically non-existent in communities of color, especially within Africa.
There’s a belief that entertainment, imagination and play are unimportant in the developing world where, in some places, basic needs have not yet been met (education, health care, electricity etc). That said, there is substantial research on the mental poverty trap in low income communities and its role in the poverty cycle. Einstein’s words on imagination are some of my favorite and are part of my inspiration in pursuing this topic.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” — Albert Einstein
The mental poverty trap I refer to can be described as a state of mind that cannot envision a life outside of poverty because of the mental stress induced by difficult living situations. This is a key contributor to the cycle of poverty — a trap and belief that there is no way to break out of the cycle. I see this as an imagination problem.
I asked myself the question: how can I create a space, within very low income communities, where people could imagine alternate futures for themselves? I envisioned location based imagination labs to create dynamic immersive spaces for play, exploration and education for children. How does this freedom of imagination affect the lives of children?
VR was an obvious answer as I asked myself how I would execute this but I wasn’t sure how the technology would be received and whether the isolation of it would be a drawback for the children. That said, the only way to know is to try and that’s what I did last weekend.
The plan was simple. Take a VR Headset (Oculus Go), download pre-existing content (DisneyVR and National Geographic VR) and take it to Kibera (the largest urban slum in Africa, located in Nairobi). I did not do any advertising and the cost to try an experience was free.
What happened was incredible.
The headset attracted a lot of attention simply for the curiosity of it. Many people of all ages stopped to try the experience. However, the greatest impact of it was amongst young children between the ages of 5 and 16. A line formed for meters and word about the headset spread throughout the community, attracting children who lived far from the town center to try it. The Oculus Go battery died several times and I had to pause activities to charge it up while children waited eagerly to get to engage with the content.
I saw the same smiles, the same sense of wonder and joy that I saw in little children in Disneyland California. Sure, VR will never replace the physical but all of a sudden it had a new intrinsic value that I hadn’t found in any other way that I’d used it. Not only were the children getting to experience the world and fantasy in a way that they had never been able to, but they were learning and having fun at the same time. It sparked immense curiosity from the children and I was bombarded with questions about nature, the world and technology — many of which I didn’t have the answer to!
The content being largely about nature resonated with the children who knew Kenya to be a place with amazing wildlife and geography, but had not had the opportunity to experience it. I did not intend for there to be a message around conservation but the children had so many ideas about what they could do to protect our animals!
Children weren’t the only participants. Men and women of all ages wanted to have a go at the fun.
I took away some key learnings from the day:
- VR is an effective imagination tool.
- Children can figure out the technology pretty quickly without much guidance.
- The experience was not isolating, it was, in fact, very inclusive and brought together an optimistic community of children to learn something new.
All this said, this was a very rapid prototype of what allo-i actually hopes to become in communities like these. I’m aware that part of the excitement was the novelty of the technology and that, eventually, it will die down. That said, I had only a handful of pre-selected experiences. As I continue on this journey, both developing the technology (to perhaps expand beyond just VR), creating spaces to teach children about gaming and programming and creating and curating content that’s both educational, fun and imaginative will be key in making this a viable structure in communities like Kibera. More research on the socio-economic effects of spaces like these still needs to be done (Hello PhD!).
Further, while the day was a huge success, there were some other aspects that could be improved on. It was very clear that the experience was way more popular with boys than with girls. I tried my best to encourage girls to participate but they were few and far between and were often wrestled out by the very eager boys. This isn’t too surprising to me. I’ve worked in Kibera for over six years now and seen in schools how boys are able to keep their dreams of being an astronaut alive way longer than girls can. The mental poverty trap is a much more serious phenomenon for girls in slum neighborhoods than for boys. Going forward, I need to be much more intentional about outreach for girls — not just to experience these new realities but to teach them how to create them for themselves.
I’ll close with another one of my favorite Einstein quotes.
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales” — Albert Einstein
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
