The imagined user journey

The booth at the festival is approximately 3x3 meters. It’s painted in an industrial grey colour. The floor is covered with a linoleum resembling concrete. The walls start out as charcoal grey by the floor, gradually changing into light grey at the top of the booth’s walls. White fabric is stretched out to form a roof, and bright light filters down through it.

A VR headset, one controller, and a tethered finger monitor are lying on a chair in the middle of the space. A peaceful sound design is playing. I, the participant, am to get the impression that this experience will be sombre, dealing with a serious issue, but also that it is friendly and not set out to scare or upset me.

An assistant appears and helps me put on the finger monitor, the headset and the controller. She explains that I can glide through the experience by using the joystick.

As the experience loads, the screen is black. Then, gradually, the same charcoal grey colour appears with white writing telling me the title of the experience and presenting the names of the three characters I will soon meet. I am informed that the experience will contain oral descriptions of abusive behaviour towards children and of wartime events. I hear the sound design that was playing in the booth, but now with a low beat that reminds me of my heartbeat. I wonder whether this is my own pulse, and try to change it. The sound design responds. I become intrigued, thinking that my response will have an effect on the experience. 

The text dissolves. A grey floor in a white, illuminated space appears, and grey shadows grow up from the floor to around three meters in height. They encircle me and define an area of around 20 meters in diameter. While this is happening, the whiteness above me grows dark and gives me the sense that there is a ceiling around 6 meters above me. The space behind the shadows and under the ceiling is filled with a mellow white light. The space now feels defined, but not constricted or threatening.

I am placed around eight meters from the centre of the circle, facing inwards. I try to move, but the joystick doesn't respond. However, a cloud of pixels is forming in the centre of the circle, slowly growing to show a tableau of two women and a child. The image is glitchy and pixelated, but clearly a recording of real people. The women look at each other while the child is occupied with its toy. The woman on the left is in her seventies. She has white hair and her features and clothing indicate that she is from northern Europe. Opposite her is a woman of African descent. A girl of around five is playing on the floor in front of her. She seems sad, bending over the toy that she is hugging.

The white-haired woman introduces them all to me and invites me to listen to their stories. She introduces herself as a Child Born of War in Norway during World War II, and the girl as another CBOW fathered by an enemy soldier in Rwanda. She asks the woman to tell her story. The two have a conversation about the challenges for women who are stigmatized for their voluntary or involuntary contact with the enemy and about the difficult situation for the girl.  

I stand there and listen. When I move my head to look at the grey figures surrounding the scene, the sound of the women talking is blurred and the murmurs I’ve heard in the background intensifies. I can recognize sentences and I become curious. When I look back at the women, their dialogue starts almost at the same place as when I looked away. I get the impression that the dialogue waits for my attention and that I can explore the shadows without missing anything. 

I try the joystick, which lets me glide over to the shadows to listen to the whispering. I hear snippets of hateful comments and people bragging about bullying children of the enemy. Some of the shadows are more hesitant, trying to argue that maybe the kids should be ignored instead, while others answer with memories of the enemy, what they did to the society, and the concern that the children might grow up to be like their fathers. 

The shadows have different voices and stories. I visit a few of them. Some of the things that are said upset me a bit — my pulse rises and I might sweat on my finger. These two things increase the sound of my pulse and change the mood — reminding me of how I can hear my own pulse when my ’blood is boiling’”. The grey colour also seems to grow darker and to include red specks. 

I return to the conversation, taking a couple more breaks to go and listen to the shadows. I understand that the shadows are voices from the mother and daughter’s local community.

When the mother recounts some of the difficult experiences the child has been exposed to, I look at the playing child and she turns her head and looks straight at me. She then follows me with her eyes. It takes me by surprise — I thought I was just watching a volumetric recording. Her eyes are hard to look at; the sad but piercing eyes of a child.

After a handful of seconds, the child looks away again and resumes playing by her mother’s feet, as if she has asked me for help and then given herself up to her fate.

I feel my stomach turn and am filled with sadness, knowing that I can’t help her. 

The white-haired woman asks about the child’s father. The mother starts to talk about him. In the middle of the first sentence, the pixelated scene with the women changes to a dark cloud that grows to envelop me. It’s like being in a grey fog. The sound design acquires a rumbling and dark quality, and the darkness is lit up by what seems like a cross between thunder and explosions. Her voice turns into a deeper, male voice that presents the situation of the fathers of CBOW — enemy soldiers or possibly even peace forces that are seen as occupiers by the local community, robbing them of their dignity. It tells of the trauma for the occupied and the need to remove the traces of the occupiers when the conflict is over. It explains the children, and how they might be seen as symbols of the enemy and that the hatred of the local community will be taken out on them, and also that the mothers themselves might be among the abusers.

The rumbling quiets and the colours lighten to a calmer grey, almost resembling dark rain clouds. The narration shifts from describing the man as a soldier to describing his role as a father, explaining that the child often misses having a biological father and dreaming of a protective father figure that can save them. I’m surprised by the contrast, struggling to see a violent enemy and longed-for father as one single person.

The foggy scene dissolves and the setting with the women and the child reappears. The grey-haired woman tells the mother about her experiences as a CBOW and they discuss the girl’s future. The conversation ends. 

The figures dissolve, leaving only the grey floor. Small, white partition walls grow out of the floor, forming an labyrinth-style exhibition. The walls display text and illustrations that explain how othering, unconscious bias and symbolic violence work to make adults turn against children in their own community because of their genetic link to occupying forces. The exhibition also includes more biographic information about the two women, the child, and the child’s father. A voice invites me to stay for as long as I’d like. 

I glide through the exhibition, reading. After a while, I take off the VR headset. The assistant notices and brings back the chair where I can leave the gear. She also hands me a card with a QR code that leads to The Children Born of War Project and the opportunity to sign and share a petition to the UN to make protection of CBOW part of all peace-making negotiations and to ensure that the children get their mother’s national citizenship.

Strengths and weaknesses

The concept for “The meeting” was developed with the aim to present the situation of today’s young CBOW and make the topic current and personal. A main goal was to let the participant get the physical sensation of meeting a child, letting the child’s body language communicate part of the topic.

Focus was placed on eye contact, showing a child’s body language, and creating an environment that was responsive to the participant.

To achieve the latter, the concept suggests implementing costly and complex equipment in the form of a finger monitor for sweat and pulse measurement. These elements would make the experience more responsive and increase the sense of presence for the participant, but they would also increase the development complexity significantly and mean that the distribution of the experience would be limited to physical venues like exhibitions or festivals.

The volumetric capture of the described conversation would also be very difficult to achieve. One challenge is the need for a volumetric capture studio, which would involve travel to a foreign place to visit a vulnerable mother and child. The other challenge would be creating a safe space for such a difficult discussion in the midst of a lot of technical equipment. 

The conversation would present a photographic rendition of the three women, showing their physical features and clothing. Showing these aspects would be necessary in order to present the child’s body language in a believable way. But it is also possible that the clothing and features might trigger unconscious biases towards the culture, race, geography and possibly religion of the adults. The specific conflict that was described could also trigger existing views or feelings in the participant. Because the goal of the experience is to present the situation for CBOW in general, and show how that experience is more or less the same in all conflicts, this form of presentation might be too context-specific to effectively communicate this general information. It would also make it harder to keep the focus on the situation of the child and not the actions of the adults or the conflict itself.

Lastly, the concept offered a problematic lack of interaction for the participant, who doesn’t have any agency except where to look and who to listen to. The participant is reduced to an invisible observer that is not given a role in the scenes. The experience consists mainly of linear storytelling, where the participant is presented with a lot of information with little opportunity to choose the order. The last exhibition phase of the experience offers the participant some more choice, but very little motivation to explore. The result is that the participant becomes a passive recipient.

Although the idea of the eye contact and attempt at presenting body language and creating a personal connection would be interesting to explore, the lack of more meaningful interaction seems a huge, missed opportunity for a VR experience. The emotional connection that might be created with the child if the participant was in a responsive environment would potentially by dampened by apathy — by being reduced to a passive receiver with no power to make meaningful choices. 

This challenge could not be resolved because the core of the experience was a conversation. Giving the participant more agency would have to involve giving them the opportunity to take part in the central activity — the conversation. Doing so would not be feasible because it be impossible to create a natural-feeling conversation between the participant and the women. The alternative would be the participant choosing between different parts of the recorded interview, but this would heighten the feeling of not being present, rather of browsing older material. The result would be the opposite of what the conversation was intended to do.

The concept of “The meeting” was abandoned because of the lack of meaningful interaction and the inability to avoid presenting specific conflicts and cultural contexts.