Embodied Virtual Reality: Redistributing Narrative Power in Contexts of War and Displacement

Abstract

This article examines how embodied Virtual Reality (VR), when used as a participatory research method, can support the narrative sovereignty of refugees from the Global South by recognising their stories as key sources of knowledge production. This approach challenges dominant humanitarian and state discourses that often frame refugees as passive victims in need of saving. The article critiques the prevalent use of VR as an empathy machine designed to provoke emotional identification with war survivors. Instead, it argues that embodied VR opens spaces for alternative narratives that offer deeper insight into the lived experiences of displacement. These 360° VR productions, filmed from a first-person perspective and incorporating multisensory cues, enable refugees to exercise narrative agency. Refugees in this study repurpose VR as a performative tool to challenge public representations and actively shape how knowledge about refugees is produced.

Introduction

This article examines how embodied Virtual Reality ¹ (VR), when employed as a participatory research method, can support the narrative sovereignty of refugees from the Global South by recognising their narratives as sources of knowledge production. Building on postcolonial feminist frameworks, it challenges the dominant humanitarian and political discourses that often portray Muslim women refugees from the Global South as voiceless victims in need of saving (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Grewal & Kaplan, 2001; Spivak, 1988). Rather than speaking for displaced women, the article discusses how multimodal and participatory research enables researchers to speak with refugees, thereby destabilising hierarchies of power and representation within academic and humanitarian knowledge production. Used in this way, embodied VR does not reduce displaced women to passive objects of intervention or humanitarian empathy. Instead, it repositions them as subjects of knowledge production, foregrounding their narrative agency and authorship.

The article is divided into two parts. It starts with a brief overview of the development of VR technology, tracing its origins within military and surveillance contexts and its use in treating PTSD among war veterans, before demonstrating its more recent use in the entertainment industry. The focus then shifts to Clouds Over Sidra (2015), a VR film produced by filmmakers Chris Milk and Gabo Arora for the United Nations and premiered at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This film exemplifies a growing tendency in humanitarian and political discourses to employ immersive technologies in ways that risk aestheticising trauma (Gruenewald & Witteborn, 2020) or display the suffering of displaced individuals for privileged audiences’ ethical self-cultivation (Hassan, 2019; Bollmer, 2017). Overall, there is little evidence that such an approach translates into meaningful social action or political transformation (Schlembach & Clewer, 2021). Instead, it risks the reproduction of unequal power dynamics by objectifying refugees and limiting their ability for self-representation.

In this article, we present an alternative methodological approach: We demonstrate how embodied VR can be used to shift perspectives from a top-down empathy-driven model to a bottom-up participant-led narration. Drawing on our fieldwork research in Jordan, we examine the use of an embodied 360° VR system called The Library of Ourselves, developed by the interdisciplinary research collective BeAnotherLab (BAL) in 2015. The Library enables the co-production of VR material with research participants who act as storytellers. ² Their lived experiences are recorded from a first-person perspective and integrated with multisensory cues. When viewers ³ engage with these narratives, they are invited to become embodied participants by synchronising their movements with the recorded environment and inhabiting the storyteller’s perspective. We examine how this approach to VR opens up spaces for embodied and co-creative encounters that foreground participants’ presence and agency. Unlike conventional cinematic VR experiences that often aim to fully communicate other’s suffering or generate emotional identification, our approach emphasises epistemic humility by recognising the limits of understanding other’s experiences. It also asserts research participants’ rights to opacity, allowing them to remain partially unknowable and not fully explained for external audiences. This approach rejects the expectation that participants’ stories must be made fully visible or emotionally accessible. Instead, it foregrounds participants’ control over what they want to share about their complex and ambiguous lives and experiences.

To further contextualise our discussion, the second part of the article focuses on two case studies from our fieldwork in Jordan and illustrates two interrelated perspectives. ⁴ The first follows the VR production process of an Iraqi grandmother and her daughter who recount the U.S. military bombing of their home, which killed three of the grandmother’s children, and the later killing of her sister by Blackwater, a U.S. private military contractor which was active during the Iraq war. The second case study focuses on a Syrian woman’s reflection on her own VR production, in which she reinhabits her personal memories through sensory and emotional immersion. By reliving her narrative, from the violence of the former Assad regime to her forced displacement to Jordan and the challenges of life in exile, she no longer viewed herself solely through the lens of victimhood. Instead, the experience enabled her to recognise and affirm her strength and agency, highlighting the decisions she made to protect her family and rebuild a life in exile.

We critically examine the extent to which the VR system of The Library technology has enabled the women in this study to reclaim narrative agency, offering not only new ways of sharing their narratives but also new modes of engaging with their past. Rather than positioning refugees solely as subjects of representation, we explore how they act as co-producers of knowledge ⁵ , actively shaping what is seen, felt, heard and enacted. What matters is not only the final VR production, as we argue, but also the collaborative process of co-creation itself. The latter, offers new insights into the social, political and emotional context in which these embodied narratives were produced.

The use of immersive VR technology offers new narrative spaces where the political and emotional complexities of war and displacement become visible. This representation does not take the form of a polished or linear account, but unfolds through the sensory fragmentation and emotional ambiguity that often characterise narrations on lived violence and trauma. The VR productions highlight the limits of understanding, acknowledging the opacity of war-related trauma and confronting both participants and viewers with their own epistemic boundaries (Caruth, 1996). These boundaries define what one is able (or allowed) to know, recognise or feel, particularly in contexts marked by war, displacement and systematic violence ⁶ . We argue that, while embodied VR is rooted in histories of military power and surveillance, the refugees we worked with have been able to repurpose it as a medium to reassert their agency and resistance. However, its use must remain reflexive, collaborative and critically engaged with careful attention to the power structures it both operates within and potentially reproduces ⁷ .

VR’s Multiple Registers: Military Applications, Technoscientific Research and the Empathy Machine

The emergence of VR can be told in multiple registers, each highlighting distinct affordances, practices, and epistemologies. In what follows, we trace VR’s ambivalent trajectories, its origin in military research and its recent reconfiguration as a medium for empathy, social impact and transformation ⁸ . This discussion provides not a holistic overview but a critical backdrop to emphasise the plurality of VR technologies ⁹ . By including these historical and conceptual shifts, we better grasp how BeAnotherLab’s approach to immersive storytelling with The Library of Ourselves departs from dominant narratives that frame VR as a “portal” to another time and place or indeed to another person’s unmediated experience of the world (cf. Andrejevic & Volcic, 2020; Belisle & Roquet, 2020; Bollmer, 2017; Holohan, 2023).

To contextualise the contemporary understanding of VR, it is useful to recall one of its earliest fictional representations. Published in 1935 by the U.S. writer Stanley G. Weinbaum (Weinbaum, 2012), the science-fiction story Pygmalion’s Spectacles envisions a pair of goggles that transport their wearer into a fully immersive, multisensory world. Here the wearer can see, hear, smell, and feel their new surroundings so vividly, the experience becomes indistinguishable from reality. The technical systems capable of producing such multisensory effects and immersive qualities were developed throughout the 20^th century, giving rise to various kinds of VR systems. Today, VR typically refers either to a computer-generated, three-dimensional graphic system, experienced through a head-mounted display (HMD) that allows 360° navigation from a first-person perspective (Murray & Sixsmith, 1999), or, since the 2010s, to cinematic VR, where 360° recordings of real-world environments replace virtual scenarios. What the sci-fi story highlights is the fantasy of seamless immersion that continues to inform contemporary conceptions of VR (cf. Carter & Egliston, 2024; Messeri, 2024). This sociotechnical imaginary positions VR as a medium of immersive realism in both, technoscientific research and documentary arts production alike.

Originally, the term Virtual Reality was coined in 1987 by computer scientist Jaron Lanier to describe immersive computer-generated graphic systems. Yet the technological and conceptual foundations of VR emerged decades earlier within the U.S. military–industrial–academic complex, where research into human–machine interaction laid its groundwork (Allen, 2017; Messeri, 2024). During the 1950s, the U.S. military and aerospace industries began developing VR as an immersive graphic system, driven by the political and technical imperatives of the Cold War (Mazuryk & Gervautz, 1996). A milestone in this trajectory came in 1968, when Ivan Sutherland created the first head-mounted display, nicknamed the “Sword of Damocles”. This prototype demonstrated the feasibility of computer-generated, interactive 3D environments, for the first time not merely in concept but in hardware. Subsequent applications of VR graphic systems emerged primarily in pilot and flight simulation. Between 1966 and 1989, computer scientist Tom Furness developed augmented and virtual display systems for the U.S. Air Force, including the so-called “Darth Vader helmet” used in fighter pilot training (Messeri, 2024, p. 43). NASA further extended VR graphics for astronaut training and spacecraft operation, solidifying VR’s early association with simulation, control, and technical precision.

Parallel developments in military and scientific research have long shared not only technological infrastructures but also goals and interests, particularly regarding the better understanding of human perception, behaviour, and decision-making. From the 1990s onward, researchers in experimental psychology and neuroscience increasingly adopted and experimented with VR to construct controlled virtual environments for the study of spatial navigation, embodied cognition and social interaction (see e.g. Slater et al., 2019; Yee & Bailenson, 2007). Controlled virtual environments proved valuable in clinical contexts, where VR was employed in exposure therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and phobias, by enabling patients to confront their fears within the physical safety of simulated environments (see e.g., Rizzo & Kim, 2005). Consequently, VR gained traction across therapeutic and healthcare domains, offering novel tools and methods for medical training, rehabilitation, and psychological treatment.

At the same time, VR’s graphic capabilities were advanced not only in scientific research laboratories but also within the creative industries, particularly in Hollywood’s motion picture studios and the adjacent gaming sector (Messeri, 2024). The creative studios drove the development of immersive graphics systems, which briefly entered the mainstream as commercial VR games by Sega and Nintendo in the 1980s and 1990s. By the late 1990s, advances in simulation technology, character animation, and scenario design had extended well beyond entertainment (Biocca & Levy, 1995). In 1999, the U.S. Army invested $45 million in the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies to develop VR-based combat training and battlefield simulations (Messeri, 2024). Today, VR systems are integral not only to armed forces worldwide but also to a growing range of industries, with applications in entertainment, training, therapy and research.

In the 2010s, VR evolved from a graphics-based simulation technology into a medium that further embraced cinematic storytelling. This extension introduced a filmmaking-oriented approach, in which 360° footage allows viewers to explore real-world environments rather than computer-generated ones. In its cinematic capacity, VR has been celebrated as an innovative extension of documentary practice, a distinctive mode of immersive storytelling that engages viewers deeply in unprecedented ways (see e.g. Nash, 2018, 2021). Whereas traditional storytelling media such as literature or film engage audiences as external observers, VR invites viewers to become embodied participants within the narrative world itself (Amlashi & Adiloglu, 2025) ¹⁰ . U.S. filmmakers like Nonny de la Peña, who promoted the concept of “immersive journalism” (de la Peña et al., 2010), and Chris Milk, who described VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk, 2015), were instrumental in shaping the discourse around VR’s potential for positive social impact (see e.g. Hassan, 2019). Milk argued that VR’s immersive qualities could not only evoke empathy but inspire advocacy on behalf of its subjects.

This framing of VR as “tech for good” (Messeri, 2024, p. 9; also Carter & Egliston, 2024) gained traction in media discourse and interdisciplinary research exploring VR’s potential to foster empathy (Bertrand et al., 2018; Borges Jelinic et al., 2025) and to “improve the lives of people, and to help overcome some societal problems” (Foxman et al., 2021; Slater & Sanchez-Vives, 2016, p. 2). Its immersive affordances attracted humanitarian initiatives (Borah et al., 2024; Holohan, 2023; Suzuki, 2022), prompting the production of VR films that addressed wide-ranging issues concerned with social and environmental justice (Amlashi & Adiloglu, 2025; Raz, 2022). This rebranding of VR as a tool for empathy and social impact coincided with its commercial resurgence after Meta’s 2014 acquisition of Oculus, a start-up founded by Palmer Luckey in 2012 to develop head-mounted displays ¹¹ . Facebook’s subsequent VR for Good initiative (2015), developed in partnership with the United Nations to support and distribute humanitarian VR films, has since prompted a growing body of critical scholarship assessing the promises and limitations of this emerging genre (cf. Holohan, 2023). The renewed interest in VR not only revived investment in the technology but also produced a selective memory of its history, as anthropologist Messeri (2024) argues. VR technology, across immersive graphics and cinematic forms, was reframed as a platform for learning, creativity, and social engagement, with innovative applications in education, remote collaboration, documentary, and media art. Yet, this emphasis on VR’s potential for social impact tends to obscure its military origins, effectively erasing the foundational role of defence research and development from the industry’s dominant narratives, particularly within the U.S. context (Carter & Egliston, 2024; Messeri, 2024).

It was during VR’s resurgence in the 2010s that BeAnotherLab (BAL), an art-science research collective based in Barcelona, developed The Library of Ourselves, the VR system we used during our field research in Jordan. Inspired by the experimental research of Event Lab for Neuroscience and Technology in Barcelona and the Ehrsson Lab at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, BAL’s immersive technologies reimagine technoscientific research tools and techniques within an artistic framework (cf. Roel Lesur et al., 2020). BAL’s VR systems and immersive installations have been described by media outlets and event organisers as “empathy machines,” echoing Chris Milk’s influential framing. Yet, while BAL explores the relationship between empathy and identity by experimenting with immersive forms of storytelling, the collective distances itself from the notion of the empathy machine, critiquing it as a commercially driven form of technosolutionism ¹² .

Emerging not from the US-tech industry but within a Spanish-speaking civil society-based context, BAL brings together interdisciplinary researchers from Latin America and Europe who adopt a markedly different approach to VR. The lab explicitly aims to resist the universalising tendencies of Anglophone technoscience, instead experimenting with alternative ways of knowing that emphasise relationality, autonomy, and local epistemologies (cf. Escobar, 2018). Their work constitutes a deliberate departure from dominant paradigms, both technically and politically, by centring embodied perspective-taking ¹³ , the epistemic agency of storytellers, and a commitment to open source ¹⁴ over commercial applications. As anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2018) argues, design practices are always embedded in ontological assumptions and cultural contexts. Viewed through this lens, BAL’s technologies express a distinctive cultural and political commitment to alternative knowledge production.

Disembodied Spectatorship: Empathy’s Limits in Immersive Humanitarian Storytelling

In popular discourse on VR, immersion is typically equated with the feeling of presence, the perceptual illusion of being there that VR aims to produce (Messeri, 2022). Presence is achieved by generating a seamless sensory environment where the interface is less apparent. As viewers look through rather than at the interface, they experience the virtual space as if it was real (Slater & Sanchez-Vives, 2016). This sense of unmediated presence constitutes VR’s apparent realism and forms the basis of its epistemic value and affective power in both, technoscientific research and documentary storytelling. The sociotechnical imaginary of seamless immersion not only enriched sci-fi stories but also drove early technical development. Ivan Sutherland famously envisioned an “ultimate display” where virtual objects would be indistinguishable from physical ones (Sutherland, 1965). The imaginary also continues to shape scientific research with VR, as neuroscientist Thomas Parsons notes: “In an ideal VR system, the user would not be able to distinguish an artificial environment from its physical counterpart” (Parsons et al., 2017, p. 2). VR’s defining feature is the apparent erasure of itself as a medium (Ceuterick & Ingraham, 2021). By performatively concealing its apparatus, VR technologies create the impression of unmediated access to other people’s experiences.

A prominent expression of this notion in the field of humanitarian storytelling is Clouds Over Sidra, a VR experience produced by filmmakers Chris Milk and Gabo Arora for the United Nations. Released in 2015 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the immersive documentary follows Sidra, a 12-year-old Syrian girl living in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. The film exemplifies Milk’s vision of VR as the “ultimate empathy machine”. In his TED Talk, he describes VR as “a very experiential medium […] it feels like real life, it feels like truth. And you feel present in the world […] and with the people that you’re inside of it with” (Milk, 2015). To better understand how VR’s immersive realism works, it is useful to draw on computer scientist Mel Slater’s distinction between immersion and presence (2003). Immersion refers to the technical inputs and sensory strategies that structure perception, such as the visual field, spatialised sound, and embodied interaction cues that can be engineered and measured. Presence, by contrast, describes the affective outcome of these strategies: the felt experience of being there, the phenomenological illusion of inhabiting another environment, without implying the cognitive belief in actual physical relocation (Messeri, 2022). This distinction opens a critical line of inquiry. If presence in VR is produced by immersive techniques, then these techniques can be examined and compared in terms of the epistemic practices and aesthetic strategies that constitute them. The immersive techniques of humanitarian VR films therefore not only generate presence and emotional resonance but also reproduce particular epistemological frames about whose lives are to be witnessed, how, and by whom. Put differently, VR films do not simply show worlds, they stage ways of knowing and relating. This analytical perspective allows us to differentiate VR systems by the forms of experience and modes of knowledge they facilitate.

Clouds Over Sidra is explicitly designed to evoke an emotional response in the audience. Shot with 360° cameras and binaural microphones, the immersive techniques position the viewer at adult eye level, moving alongside Sidra through her daily routines, from her family’s tent to crowded classrooms, along busy dirt roads, a gym and a football field. The experience is audiovisual, rather than fully embodied: The viewer’s body is not visually represented. Viewers observe the intimate immediacy of the setting but cannot interact. They occupy a disembodied presence within the cinematic scenario (cf. Suzuki, 2022). Yet, this configuration still produces the sense of presence. As viewers, we found ourselves smiling at Sidra’s descriptions of her day and attuning to the glances of other children, drifting along the camp’s dirt roads, as camera. The film’s narration further shapes the viewer’s experience. Sidra briefly introduces herself in Arabic, but the remainder of her narrative unfolds in the voiceover of an accented English translation, an editorial decision that reorients the story towards Euro-American spectatorship. Moreover, the soundtrack of melancholic piano music underscores the scenes, its overt sentimentality clearly intended to elicit emotional response. These aesthetic choices, camera positioning and a disembodied viewer, linguistic framing, and musical score collectively stage not only what is seen and heard, but how the viewer is meant to feel and relate. As feminist film scholars like Laura Mulvey (1975) long argued, the gaze is never neutral. VR may envelop the viewer in visual data, but it remains structured by a literal and ideological frame.

Clouds Over Sidra has been celebrated in humanitarian storytelling for its ability to evoke empathy. In his TED Talk, Milk recalls presenting the film in Davos: “[T]hrough this machine we become more compassionate, […] more empathetic, and […] more connected. And ultimately, we become more human” (2015). Milk conflates VR’s immersive qualities with the feeling of presence, further linking both to heightened empathy: “You’re sitting there with her [Sidra]. […] And because of that, you feel her humanity in a deeper way. You empathize […] in a deeper way. And I think that we can change minds with this machine” (2015). Yet, this framing relies on a problematic understanding of both VR and empathy (see e.g. Messeri, 2024; Nakamura, 2020; Sora-Domenjó, 2022). It assumes that VR’s immersive realism transcends mediation. However, VR’s immersive realism does not inherently resolve the problems of traditional documentary representation but can exacerbate them. Like all media, VR is a representational form. Its content is staged, edited, and framed through deliberate decisions about what to depict, from whose perspective, and for which audience. The medium’s perceived immediacy obscures the power relations that shape its production, who authors the narrative, whose viewpoint is privileged and how it is designed to elicit a particular response. This tension is reflected in the conception of empathy that underpins Clouds over Sidra and other humanitarian VR films (cf. Raz, 2022).

Broadly understood, empathy describes the capacity to understand and share another’s feelings, experiences, and perspectives beyond cognitive recognition to encompass emotional resonance. Yet, as a concept marked by inherent ambiguity and complexity (Hollan & Throop, 2011; Throop & Zahavi, 2020), empathy remains an imperfect, partial, and at times problematic mode of engagement. Without critical reflexivity, it risks appropriating or misrepresenting the experiences of others (Geertz, 1973; Rosaldo, 1989, p. 2). Anthropologist Webb Keane offers a nuanced summary: “Empathy centres on some capacity to enter into the first-person perspective of another, while remaining aware it is another’s. [...] Empathy is neither knowledge about, nor a full entry into, another’s experiences. Knowing what another is going through doesn’t necessitate any particular emotional response. And full merging would cease to be truly empathic, since one wouldn’t be able to distinguish between one’s own feelings and another’s” (2013, p. 2). In Milk’s framing however, empathy equals emotional identification, further implying that a brief immersive encounter generates understanding and prompts positive action. Accordingly, Milk’s rhetoric centres the viewer’s affective experience: “These are people who [usually don’t sit] in a tent in a refugee camp in Jordan, but on that afternoon in Switzerland, they all found themselves there, and they were affected by it” (2015). Rather than affirming Sidra’s agency, the film positions her as a narrative device through which the audience can feel moved. By privileging the viewer’s emotional response, empathy becomes a strategic tool for elite consolation, not a platform for Sidra’s voice.

Following digital media scholar Carolyn Pedwell (2014), we question the structure of the empathic encounter that Clouds Over Sidra facilitates. Pedwell cautions that empathy often serves as a regulatory affect, a performance of ethical subjecthood by privileged viewers (in Anglophone discourse often white, middle-class Euro-Americans). Such performances allow viewers to “feel good” about their moral sensitivity, without undertaking the deeper work of political accountability or structural change (Nakamura, 2020). The rhetoric of empathy can thus offer moral gratification while displacing the need for sustained engagement, self-reflection, or recognition of complicity in systems of inequality, displacement, and conflict.

This dynamic risks reinscribing a paternalistic logic, sustaining the very geopolitical hierarchies the film purports to confront, while reducing complex socio-political realities to packaged emotional experiences. Sara Ahmed’s (2004) concept of the affective economy is instructive here. Emotions, she argues, do not reside solely in individuals but circulate and accumulate value in ways that reproduce social hierarchies. Clouds Over Sidra trades in this affective currency. The viewer is invited to feel for Sidra, not with her. The replacement of Sidra’s original Arabic narration with an English translation underscores this asymmetry. Sidra is not positioned as the co-author of her story but a figure through whom elite spectators affirm their humanity. The empathic encounter remains asymmetrical (cf. Bollmer, 2017). The privileged viewer is granted intimacy without risk, protected from critique, while the marginalised subject is exposed, made emotionally legible and consumable. Crucially, humanitarian VR films of this kind do not prompt viewers to interrogate their role in global systems of inequality or reflect on the structural conditions that produce for example the refugee crisis. Instead, the viewer’s disembodied presence resembles the imperial gaze: all-seeing, unlocatable, and unaccountable (Hall, 1997; Said, 1978; Spivak, 1988). In this configuration, empathy risks becoming a form of aestheticised, even voyeuristic spectatorship, where suffering is packaged for emotional consumption and the gratification of the privileged. As Susan Sontag (2013) cautions, the aestheticisation of suffering can displace political understanding and accountability, which risks rendering projects like Clouds Over Sidra as proxies for, rather than instruments of, transformative action.

Ultimately, humanitarian VR films like Clouds Over Sidra reveal more about the desires of their producers and intended audiences than about their subjects’ lives. The affective power of such films rests on a proximity to suffering, rather than on the subjectivity or agency of those it depicts. To develop a more reflexive research practice using immersive media, it is necessary to distinguish between different modes of VR storytelling and to scrutinise the epistemic assumptions, aesthetic techniques, and conditions of production and reception that shape them. In what follows, we contrast how The Library of Ourselves establishes a sense of presence in the audience, by drawing on the epistemic practices of multisensory synchronisation. This creates a fully embodied experience in the viewer, not with the aim of rendering seamless immersion more total, more ultimate but as an aesthetic and relational strategy that foregrounds multisensory perspective-taking and shared agency between storyteller and participant.

The Library of Ourselves: An Embodied VR System for Co-Creative Storytelling

The public typically encounters VR as either computer-generated environments or 360° films. Both formats offer immersive yet predominantly audiovisual experiences. The Library of Ourselves departs from this paradigm. BeAnotherLab (BAL) describes The Library as a methodology and creative practice for both, producing and experiencing immersive documentary films. The VR system integrates 360° cinematic storytelling with multisensory synchronisation protocols, inspired by neuroscientific research on embodied cognition ¹⁵ . The Library captures real-world environments from the first-person perspective of the storyteller, enabling viewers to become embodied participants by stepping into the storyteller’s sensory and narrative point of view, listening to their story and experiencing the world through their affective lens. However, while this stepping into distinguishes immersive cinematic experience from traditional documentary practices, it does not by itself, as Holohan argues (2023), substantiate the claim of immersive realism, that is, the idea of gaining direct access to another person’s lifeworld, experience, or perception of it. In the case of The Library, it is an invitation for the audience to meet the storyteller on their terms.

Unlike conventional VR films, The Library expands immersion beyond the audiovisual, transforming it into a multisensory, full-body engagement. Central to this shift is the illusion of a body swap between viewer and storyteller. The body swap, referred to in cognitive neuroscience and psychology as the body transfer illusion, describes the perceptual experience of temporarily inhabiting a body other than one’s own (see e.g. Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008). The illusion is induced by synchronising multiple sensory inputs, typically visual, tactile, and proprioceptive cues between two bodies in such a way that the brain integrates them as referring to a single body (see e.g. Petkova et al., 2011; Slater et al., 2010). When a person sees touch and motion from another’s first-person perspective, while simultaneously feeling that touch and motion, the brain is “tricked” into attributing these sensations to the observed body. Put differently, when in first-person perspective, “visuo-tactile” and “visuo-motor” cues align ¹⁶ , they create the compelling perceptual illusion of being located in the other body (Lenggenhager et al., 2007, 2009), whether that body is a virtual avatar (Maselli & Slater, 2013), a mannequin (Van der Hoort et al., 2011), or the body of another person (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008). BeAnotherLab reinterprets the scientific research technique of the body transfer illusion within an artistic framework of co-creation. Rather than masking mediation in pursuit of seamless immersion, mediation becomes an explicit component of both the storyteller’s creative process and the viewer’s experience of it. This shift from immersive realism and its concealed mediation toward an explicitly articulated epistemic practice of embodiment reframes the storyteller as the epistemic agent of the immersive documentary, while the viewer is invited to become an embodied participant.

Crucial to this transformation are three design interventions that fundamentally change the epistemic frame. First, by adopting a first rather than third-person perspective, the embodied participant is situated within the storyteller’s environment, perceiving their body and surroundings as if they were their own. The storyteller decides which spaces and environments are meaningful to them and how they want to share them with their audience. Second, the multisensory interaction protocols engage not only sight and sound but also touch, smell, and proprioception ¹⁷ . The storyteller thinks of each of the senses and how they want to include their stimulation in a scene. Viewers are required to mimic the storyteller’s prerecorded movements, such as raising an arm or receiving an object from another person in the scene. These objects are usually meaningful to the storyteller and are selected with great care. The viewer de facto receives objects that match the tactile characteristics of the ones in the film. They are handed to the viewer by a facilitator who guides the immersive experience and who provides additional sensory cues, like touch or scent, maintaining embodied alignment with the filmed perspective. This synchronisation between the recorded image and the viewer’s enactment enables the third and most distinctive feature of The Library, the compelling illusion of the body swap between viewer and storyteller. The viewer experiences the illusion of inhabiting the storyteller’s full-bodied, first-person perspective, while listening to their voice and witnessing their sensory design of the scene ¹⁸ .

Reclaiming Perspective in the VR Production Process: Narrative Agency of an Iraqi Refugee Family

As explained earlier, the technological and conceptual foundation of VR were established decades ago within the U.S. military-industrial-academic complex. Today, VR continues to play a central role in military training programmes and operations around the world. This resemblance between contemporary VR equipment and military gear was immediately recognised by one of our project participants, an 80-year-old Iraqi woman based in Jordan. Her encounter with the technology serves as the first example in this article to illustrate how participants’ involvement in the VR production extends beyond the role of storytellers. They actively repurpose VR technology as a tool for agency, self-representation and resistance.

The VR team arrived with sensitive equipment, including headsets, helmet, cameras, microphones, recording devices and laptops. To ensure safe transport, the equipment was stored in a hard-shell, waterproof and impact-resistance suitcase. The suitcase, however, did not represent protection for the grandmother, but symbolised destruction and violence. Its resemblance to the Pelican military cases used by soldiers triggered a traumatic memory for the grandmother, namely the massacre that happened in Baghdad on 16 September 2007, involving the Blackwater company and the killing of her sister. Blackwater Worldwide (now known as Constellis) ¹⁹ is a private military company (PMC) founded in 1997 by the former U.S. Navy SEAL, Eric Prince. Blackwater was contracted by the U.S. government to provide private security services, including guarding infrastructure and performing high-risk security operations, during the war in Iraq. ²⁰ In 2007, while escorting a U.S. diplomatic vehicle, Blackwater contractors opened fire on Iraqi civilians at Al-Nisour Square in Baghdad killing 17, including women and children, and injuring more than 20 civilians. Blackwater claims that they were responding to an attack, but no evidence was ever found that these civilians were armed or have posed any threat to the security agents (Apuzzo & Schmidt, 2014). One of the women killed was the grandmother’s sister. The suitcases we brought in triggered memories of her loss and helplessness before the perpetrators, who had acted with impunity without fear of legal or political consequences. ²¹

As we began unpacking the helmet and mounting the front and rear cameras, the grandmother explained that this equipment has triggered another memory: the U.S. bombardment of her house in Baghdad which resulted in the killing of three of her children. She recalled how the soldiers who stormed her house wore night vision, cameras, headphones and infrared patches. The resemblance between their military gear and the VR equipment deeply unsettled her. With anger, she asked: “Do you know that no one was made accountable for all the killing, violence and destruction these foreign soldiers brought upon us Iraqis? […]. Tell me, where you come from, there in Europe, do they know what really happened to us? Do people in Europe know what we have been going through? Do they know about our feelings, losses and misery?”. ²² She questioned our role in the research asking: “So, you come here to listen to our stories. Then what? What do you do then?” and warned: “You better go back and tell them our side of the story”.

We explained to her that she could use the VR equipment to tell her story. Her daughter joined the conversation and said:

With this camera, you can tell the world what happened to your sister and to your children and to your house. You can show them evidence. You can make them listen to your version of the story. We can all be together in the recording and help you tell the world what they do not know about the war in Iraq.

We recognised that the equipment had already triggered painful memories. We emphasised that her emotional wellbeing is our primary concern and that we would leave if she preferred but she quickly interrupted: “Where do you think yourself going? Now, you stay here. I have a lot to tell you. I have a lot to tell your world. They are probably all blinded by their media that lies about us. I want to tell them my story”. The grandmother and her daughter were both enthusiastic about engaging with the VR technology and curious to explore what it could offer. They decided to tell their stories together, reflecting on their shared family experiences during the war in Iraq. They were particularly interested in the embodied dimension of VR and how it could activate the senses of those who would later engage with their story. They were eager to understand how sensory experiences could be generated and accessed through the use of prompts.

As we explained the concept of proprioceptive engagement and how it can create moments of sensorial co-presence and embodiment within the VR-scene, the family became increasingly involved in shaping the narrative. Our role was not to direct but to facilitate: we explained the conceptual frameworks and demonstrated technical possibilities of the VR, while ensuring not to influence the narrative or impose our own interpretations. The aim was to foreground the narrative agency of the storyteller who is responsible for designing the content and deciding on the sensory conditions of the experience. What is seen, felt and enacted is, for the most part, determined and initiated by the storyteller. In this case, the Iraqi family suggested several objects to include in the VR-scene, such as photographs and passports, which were meant to function as tactile and visual cues, representing their loss and displacement. The grandmother explained: “Here, show them these pictures. These are the pictures of my children. The children the Americans killed in Iraq. Here in Jordan, all I have left of my beloved ones are these pictures”. The grandmother insisted the passports to be part of the narrative and the recording as they symbolised her sister’s killing by Blackwaters agents:

[…] On that day, my sister wanted to get a new passport for her daughter. The American Blackwater started shooting. 17 men, among them one woman. This woman was my sister.

Through the VR technology, the grandmother connects with the viewer not only through her voice but also by enabling tactile engagement with personal objects she chose to include. In the VR-scene, the viewer synchronises their movement with the grandmother’s, reaching out to receive her passport as she extends her shaky hands. By reaching out to hold the document and feeling the texture of its cover and imprint, a moment of sensorial co-presence is generated: the viewer’s body awareness extends into the VR-scene. Participants perceive the body swap illusion and feel as if they were embodying the person touching the passport. The grandmother’s narrative is no longer just heard and seen but physically and emotionally felt.

The grandmother’s insistence on including the passports and the photographs present her desire to control and shape the narrative on her own terms (Benjamin, 2019; Mignolo, 2011). She determines what is included and how it is experienced in the VR: the grandmother guides the participant to reflect on who these individuals in the photographs were, how they lived and whether they survived. The perceptual interactions, including reaching, holding and posing, generate a sense of connection grounded in somatic engagement. Through the VR technology, the grandmother shifts from being a subject of documentation to a co-author and co-creator of her own story, asserting thereby her presence and preserving the memory of her loss, refusing its erasure.

Participant’s Reflections on VR Production: A Syrian Woman’s Narrative of Regime Violence and Displacement

This second case study focuses on a Syrian woman’s reflection on her VR production, in which she reinhabits her personal memories through sensory and emotional immersion, prompted by the tactile and visual cues she chose for her narrative. Using the 360° VR technology, we filmed the Syrian woman’s living room, kitchen and balcony. Once we came back with the finished VR production, she was able to inhabit her own body in the VR-scene, experiencing the embodiment of her story and be immersed in her daily environment. In her narrative, she witnesses her resilience in the face of the Assad regime’s war crimes, her forced displacement and the struggles she faced in exile. The woman’s body, through the VR medium, becomes a site of self-discovery. She observers her memory of war and witnesses her resilience and survival through caring for her family, supporting her husband financially through home-based entrepreneurial work and providing support to her community.

The Syrian woman enters the VR-scene and steps into her own memory-space, surrounded by her familiar environment of people and objects that shape her everyday life. By embodying her own perspective in VR, she does not merely recall her memory, as was the case during her audio recording. This time she is living and inhabiting it. In this sense, the VR experience does not simply reflect her past but transforms it, allowing her to embody a reality she lived but not yet consciously acknowledged, until she witnessed it in her own VR-experience: “Did I really do all this?”, she asked in astonishment after she participated in her own VR. The immersive experience offered her the opportunity to see herself differently: not as a passive victim, as often represented by humanitarian discourses, but as an agent of resilience and care.

Syrian refugees in Jordan face increased economic demands due to the barriers they face in the labour market including increased discrimination and legal restrictions (Koburtay et al., 2020; Refai et al., 2024; Vandevoordt, 2015). The Syrian woman, therefore, sought informal work through cooking and babysitting to provide for her family. Such forms of home-based labour often emerge as a response to the structural instabilities and financial precarities Syrian refugees experience in Jordan (Elkafrawi et al., 2022; Refai et al., 2018). This contrasts with life in Damascus since often:

[…] women did not work. One salary was enough. We had our own house. No rent. Here we have rent to pay. Electricity and the children’s cost. All these necessities. My husband works outside of the house, and I support him by working from home. […] No one can help us and everything is expensive. We need to help ourselves.

As she speaks about her role in supporting her family through home-based cooking, she stands in the VR-scene in the same kitchen, seeing herself in action, surrounded by her daughter and her friend who help her with the food preparation. This immersive embodiment of the Syrian woman’s own narrative shifts her position from a speaker of trauma to a witness of her own resilience: She prepares traditional Syrian dishes to sell to support her husband financially in exile. She manages the household and takes care of the children and is surrounded by her community who provide collective support. This shift in positionality allows her to reclaim her voice not just as a narrator but as an active agent in the formation of her own narrative. She no longer sees herself through the lens of victimhood but observes herself as someone who made important life choices, offering herself and her family protection and better opportunities in a time of war.

The immersive experience generated through sensory cues, including the sound of chopping in the kitchen scene, or the sight of her daughter helping her to cook, are triggers of embodied memory. A powerful movement occurred when the Syrian woman reached out to take a bunch of parsley offered by her daughter and smells it. The smell and touch of parsley in real-time, corresponding to the action seen in the VR-scene, transformed the abstract memory of past events into an embodied, lived and sensory experience. In that moment, the sensory experience grounds her narrative in physical space, turning it into a lived and embodied encounter.

In the last scene of the VR experience, the Syrian woman stands on her own balcony, filmed in real-life as part of her ongoing narration. As she speaks about her Arab-style courtyard in Damascus which used to be filled with jasmine and roses, she is sensorially re-entering a similar space:

I have a balcony here. I always go out in the afternoon to water the plants. I stand in front of them and dream of Damascus. In Damascus, we had a large courtyard full of plants. We used to clean the yard and water the plants. We used to have a jasmine tree that smelled so nice. All the blossoms filled the air with their scent. It would fill up your chest and make you feel alive. […] Here, I have my plants too. Whenever I water them, I remember Damascus and remember its smell.

While immersed in the VR-scene, the Syrian woman experiences synchronised sensory prompts, feeling the warmth of the sun and the breeze of the open air in real-time. Standing virtually on her balcony surrounded by her jasmine trees and roses, she is able to smell their scent as she narrates them not as imagined or remembered abstractions but as embodied sensations, facilitated through coordinated multi-sensory cues. This immersive environment reactivates embodied memory, engaging multiple senses in parallel to create a deeply effective recollection. The VR experience enables the Syrian woman to re-feel her past through multi-sensory stimuli that reproduce physical sensations recalling specific memories of sunlight, breeze and scent. This sensory-emotive re-inhabitation results not only in a memory that is recalled but also relived. The embodied space of the courtyard is a sensorial reminder of her home in Damascus where she used to socialise with family and friends while drinking coffee and smelling the scent of jasmine and roses. The physical space of the Arab-style architecture reflects social and cultural meaning beyond its material form. The Arab-style courtyard becomes a metaphor for communal belonging, cultural rootedness and security.

The woman’s sensory encounter with her narrative activated a sense of self-realisation and pride, allowing her to recognise and acknowledge her own resilience. The VR experience becomes a space of re-affirmation of self-worth. The Syrian woman anchors her memories of the lost homeland through the body and the senses. She mobilises silenced narratives of resistance, resilience and endurance through the power of sensory-emotive memory (cf. Seremetakis, 1994). This memory, as she articulated it through the VR-production, offers a counter-history of war and displacement of Syrian families, thereby challenging dominant political and humanitarian discourses of victimhood. As she watched and felt herself in action, the immersive encounter in the VR made her realise that she not only survived the violence of the former Assad regime but made her appreciate that she was the one who rescued her family and supported them to flourish in exile. She explains: “I only came here to Jordan because of my children. To keep them safe. […] Look at them now! Thanks to God, they are safe, healthy and have their own business. I am proud of them. I am proud of myself!”.

Embodied Experience, Narrative Agency and Politics of Empowerment

Virtual Reality is often presented as an “empathy machine”, understood as a tool designed to evoke emotions in participants by immersing them in someone else’s suffering, inviting them to “become the Other”. The ultimate goal of such experiences is to generate emotional identification with the suffering of others. The focus is often not on the person who is enduring the suffering but on the emotional responses of the viewers themselves. Rather than engaging critically with the political and historical circumstances that have produced violence, loss and displacement, survivors are reduced to a spectacle in which their suffering is flattened and decontexualised to fit into a humanitarian framework that highlights empathy rather than accountability.

In this article, we introduced and discussed the embodied 360° VR-production as a participatory research method that aims to prioritise the agency, voice and sovereignty of war survivors. ²³ Unlike conventional cinematic VR productions, such as those developed by Milk, our approach pushes the boundaries of immersion by moving visual and auditory engagement to create a fully embodied and multi-sensory experience. However, instead of centring the feelings of external spectators, we have turned the attention to the epistemic agency of those who are sharing their stories in their own language ²⁴ . Women in this study were able to reclaim control over how their stories are told, what sensory cues to include, and what emotional and political message they convey. This approach shifts power dynamics and redefines subject-object hierarchies anew: War survivors are, thereby, recognised as a legitimate source of knowledge who define and communicate their own experiences through the embodied VR platform. The person featured in the documentary is no longer a distant figure observed as a spectacle but becomes the narrator of their own story, while the viewer takes on the role of an active sensory participant. To illustrate this shift, we have focused on two interrelated perspectives: the role war-survivors play in the VR production process and their experiences as participants within their own immersive narratives.

In the case of the Iraqi women, their involvement extends beyond storytelling as they take an active role in reshaping the function of the VR technology. The grandmother insisted on using VR technology, despite (or because of) its military genealogy, to reclaim her narrative. Her aim was to make visible and sensorially felt what she believes has long been silenced or ignored. As she stated: “I have a lot to tell your world. They are probably all blinded by their media that lies about us. I want to tell them my story”. She took a medium associated with violence and repurposed it for articulating her own resistance, testimony and agency. By explicitly naming Blackwater agents, she intentionally drew attention to the systematic violence of U.S. military and private contractor during the Iraq war. In doing so, she transforms the VR equipment into a tool of reclamation and repossession, repurposing its militarised origins to expose the destruction caused by the U.S. military engagement in Iraq. The Iraqi family’s VR production becomes a form of counter-narrative challenging dominant accounts of war and displacement in the Middle East.

The Syrian woman’s experience focused on reinhabiting her own personal memories through sensory and emotional immersion. By reliving her own narrative of war, displacement and survival within the VR environment, she no longer viewed herself through the lens of victimhood but as a source of strength and agency: She was the one who made the decision to leave Syria and to seek refuge in Jordan; she now supports her family financially through home-based work and actively helps other members of her displaced community as they settle in Jordan. Experiencing these memories in VR enabled her to recognise and affirm her own agency in managing the multiple challenges her family faced. The immersive re-engagement with her past allowed her to consciously value her role as a protector and provider, highlighting the often overlooked role women play in forced migration (Freedman, 2015).

We have illustrated in this article, how The Library of Ourselves transforms the scientific concept of the body transfer illusion into a tool for participatory, narrative-based practices of embodied knowledge production. What is seen, felt, heard and enacted is predominantly determined by the storyteller not the researcher. Rather than pursuing realism by concealing mediation, The Library foregrounds it as a creative technique. Immersion becomes not just presence, but epistemic engagement explicitly enacted by the storyteller to draw the audience into their narrative. This foregrounding of narrative agency re-orients the design of the VR system and its enactment from a medium of observational realism to one of embodied co-creation. Unlike conventional documentaries or VR experiences like Clouds Over Sidra, which present subjects as objects of spectatorship, The Library positions the research participant as a storyteller and epistemic agent. Storytellers frame their own bodies, voices, and experiences, guiding their audience through a narrative developed from their perspectives. This participatory reconfiguration destabilises subject-object hierarchies in conventional documentary practice. The audience no longer observes a mediated “other” but synchronises with the storyteller’s perceptual and affective world, challenging their own assumptions and responses in the process of participation. The result is not a mutual, real-time exchange, but a temporary inhabitation of another’s embodied perspective based on their terms. It is an invitation to imagine differently, to engage with another perspective, and to challenge one’s own limits, assumptions and preconceptions. Through carefully designed interaction, the audience experiences storytelling as a shared, co-created act, unfolding in and through the body. This shift redefines storytelling as a process of mutual transformation rather than unilateral transmission. Immersive techniques are not only employed to generate presence; they are creatively modified to shape what the participating audience comes to know, feel, and understand.