From Digital Media to Empathic Spaces: A Systematic Review of Empathy Research in Extended Reality Environments

Abstract

Recent advances in extended reality (XR) technologies have enabled new and increasingly realistic empathy tools and experiences. In XR, all interactions take place in different spatial contexts, all with different features, affordances, and constraints. We present a systematic literature survey of recent work on empathy in XR. As a result, we contribute a research roadmap with three future opportunities and six open questions in XR-enabled empathy research across both physical and virtual spaces.