Imagine putting on a virtual reality (VR) headset and being transported to a rundown flat where an enraged man towers over you, violently spitting expletive-laden threats in your face before verbally abusing your mother.

This is ‘Being Me’. Not the latest VR horror experience, but a foster parent coaching initiative from UK social enterprise Cornerstone Partnership. It takes users through stages of an abused child’s development to help trainee caregivers gain visceral insight into why traumatised children behave as they do. By letting people experience a situation more deeply than watching it on a flat 2D screen, Being Me helps caregivers understand situations from an abused child’s perspective. It’s the nearest a person can get to the harrowing reality of being an abused child without going through the experience themselves.

Being Me is proving to be a vital tool in achieving ‘placement stability’, meaning long-lasting placements that make children feel secure. Since Cornerstone Partnership started trials a year ago, every case in which it has been used has remained stable. “This is far more deep-seated than using VR as a training tool or to create awareness,” explains Helen Costa, Cornerstone Partnership’s CEO. “It’s about altering people’s beliefs and their behaviour. Despite what people may know intellectually, letting them experience it is more likely to change what they believe.”

Since it launched last year, 34 out of the 144 UK local authorities that run children’s services have signed up. Costa and her team are so convinced of VR’s power to change behaviour that they’re trying to secure funds to apply the approach to knife crime, smoking and obesity.

Since virtual reality began to become accessible around five years ago with the arrival of headsets such as Oculus and Gear VR, fears have been aired about a future in which people no longer know how to interact in the real world. And yet VR’s unrivalled ability to shift attitudes and behaviour is proving itself as a force for social good. Oculus, owned by Facebook, has launched a VR for Good arm to support content creators who use VR “to make the world a better place”.

While traditional flat screens offer a limited field of view, VR headsets allow users to experience someone else’s reality in 360 degrees. It’s the hardware’s ability to drive compassion – VR pioneer Chris Milk called it the “empathy machine” back in 2015 – that’s at the heart of “for good” experiences like Being Me.

Researchers at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) understand the added value of interaction and are at the cutting edge of VR research. The department created ‘Becoming Homeless’, an interactive VR experience in which users make decisions that result in them losing their homes and then confronting the consequences. The experiment found that experiencing a homeless person’s perspective produced more pro-social behaviours, with users agreeing to the idea of paying more tax in return for affordable housing. “We’re still not sure why VR increases empathy,” says VHIL’s lead researcher Fernanda Herrera. “It could be that its immersive qualities allow users to experience viscerally what it’s like to be somebody else, or that they undergo body transfer to experience the virtual world as their avatar, or that cognitive resources are better allocated and users can focus on the experiential aspect.”

Being Me and Becoming Homeless aren’t the only examples of VR that tackle human problems. From distracting women from the pain of childbirth with beach scenes, to meditation experiences to reduce stress, VR’s full immersion makes it ripe for the thriving wellness market. The medical sector has championed VR since its inception through a plethora of educational, training and visualisation applications, and its therapeutic potential is now also being embraced. For example, VR exposure therapy lets PTSD patients relive and confront traumatic memories in the safety of a virtual environment. Other innovative VR therapies include the Boston-based Center for Mind and Culture’s ReScript project, in which nightmare sufferers manipulate disturbing images into something more anodyne. And Pixvana/Limbix’s tool for adolescent depression – where teenagers visually experience scenes that tell them they’re not alone while offering guidance on dealing with feelings – is somewhat ironic, considering many worry that VR will drive people deeper into isolation.

Another project that tackles this paradox head on is Alcove, a VR app that aims to alleviate social isolation in older generations. Users enter a virtual home to interact with different items through handheld controllers. This triggers options that range from uploading photos onto the wall, to fantastical experiences like swimming with dolphins. Friends’ avatars can also be invited to join and chat. “Immersive media allows people to stay in touch with the world as we know it,” says Alcove’s creator Cezara Windrem. “It brings closer a reality that may otherwise be out of reach due to mobility issues, time or budget constraints. This is especially relevant for people in older age groups.”

VR’s gentler qualities are also being employed by the enterprise world to nurture soft skills. Vantage Point is a new initiative that helps people understand what sexual harassment feels like, making it a pertinent addition at a time when corporations are waking up to diversity and inclusion (D&I). “Discomfort and fear are subjective,” says Vantage Point’s founder and CEO Morgan Mercer. “It’s a struggle to put them into words. But VR places you in a room where you can feel somebody else’s discomfort and tie that feeling to an action that positively influences the outcome.”

D&I isn’t the only hot-button issue looking to VR for salvation. Even environmentalism benefits from its transformative powers. London-based studio Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) creates nature-themed experiential installations that use VR to engage and entertain, while increasing awareness around species extinction. In what MLF’s creative director Robin McNicholas calls “stealth education”, its latest experience transports users inside a sequoia to develop heightened appreciation for that tree.

But MLF also capitalises on the VR production process itself to create “digital fossils”. Thanks to collaboration with scientists and researchers, MLF’s plant and animal recreations are so scientifically accurate that the scans needed to build this virtual flora and fauna are saved as “fossils” for future generations.

Belfast-based Performance Without Barriers has meanwhile identified VR as a tool to help people with disabilities create music. “VR has been an amazing branching out for us,” explains principal investigator Dr Franziska Schroeder. “It does things that off-the-shelf technologies don’t do. For instance, Marie-Louise has cerebral palsy. She can move her upper body but not with enough motor-control accuracy to play the drums, guitar or piano. So we used VR to create a graphic interface with colourful boxes that she can select with handheld controllers to trigger sounds that make music.”

Of course, there are other immersive technologies besides VR. Augmented reality (AR) places a digital layer on users’ real environments. And because AR headsets have been slower to come to market, its quest to solve societal problems is just beginning. But we’re already seeing the birth of initiatives like Magic Lines, which hopes to use the Magic Leap headset to help dementia and Parkinson’s sufferers by rerouting brain signals through simple coloured lines and patterns layered over the patient’s environment.

As AR headsets improve, more “for good” AR applications will arrive. Likewise, VR’s potential to tackle societal problems will also get a boost from new developments. Advancements like tetherless headsets (whereby users can roam freely) and 5G’s increased speed, capacity and reliability will enhance the “sense of presence”, which in turn drives a greater sense of belonging and compassion.

Throw data and artificial intelligence (AI) into the mix, and the results become game-changing. “There’s a strong correlation between data, AI, AR and VR,” says Being Me’s Adrian Leu. “These technologies are part of a useful stack. A mobile or internet-of-things device that collects data can use AI to transform it into information that’s then visualised by AR or VR in a contextually intelligent way.” This approach has clear commercial potential, but it will also be interesting to see how the “VR for good” pioneers exploit these combinations.

Amara’s Law states that we tend to “overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. Nowhere is this more true than VR. The wild excitement that greeted 2014’s first VR headsets diminished alongside realisations that expectations were overhyped. But now the medium is growing up and finding new purpose. If Amara’s Law holds true, VR’s market – projected to swell to $192.7 billion by 2022^[1] – will be in rude health, in more ways than one.