Empathy & Connection Through Immersive Experiences
Presented by Georgie Pinn, Founder & Director, INTERACTOR, at ‘Worlds of Possibility: Transforming Education with Immersive Technologies’
In an era where technology often seems to widen the gap between individuals, Georgie Pinn is pioneering new ways to harness the potential of immersive technology to bridge these divides, fostering empathy and connection in ways previously unimagined.
Georgie is the founder of INTERACTOR, a collective that connects humans by creating captivating immersive worlds and multisensory interactive experiences. Having spent over a decade exploring and experimenting with the power of immersive storytelling, Georgie’s mission is to tap into this power to dismantle biases, break down prejudice, and foster empathy by allowing people to see the world through others' eyes - a concept she calls “shapeshifting”.
“Sharing another's identity allows us to see echoes of ourselves in one another. XR experiences can be truly transformative, engaging us emotionally and offering us deep emotional learning. The multisensory nature of these experiences can leave a lasting impact on us because they are not just seen or heard, but felt.”
A passionate advocate of immersive technology as an instrument for emotional education, Georgie has worked extensively with students across both primary and high school. In this article, she shares her experiences in providing children with unique platforms for creative and emotional expression.
ELECTRIC PUPPET: EXPLORING EMPATHY THROUGH CHARACTER CUSTOMISATION & REAL-TIME MOTION CAPTURE
In 2012, Georgie discovered spatial computing and its ability to remove the long, uphill process of animation. From this discovery, Electric Puppet was born - an interactive installation that allowed children to design and animate characters, activated using motion capture to animate their movements in real time.
Through Electric Puppet, Georgie witnessed a profound emotional engagement and empathic connection between the children and the characters they had created. Beyond this, the project showcased the accessible and inclusive nature of motion-captured immersive technology, allowing children with physical and learning disabilities to shine.
“They were better than everybody else. They had this ability to slow right down, tune into what was happening when they moved their arm, and created really powerful animations.”
Video by Georgie Pinn, INTERACTOR
ELECTRIC MIRROR: EMPATHY & INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING
By activating and animating audiovisual elements in real time, Georgie is able to offer people unbound creative agency in her practice.
“People are able to become artists, people that have never animated or made sound in their lives become creators, and that's a beautiful thing to activate and see.”
In Electric Mirror, a high school workshop program, students created self-portraits that transformed into animated avatars. The anonymity of these avatars offered a powerful opportunity for vulnerable self-expression, allowing students to express feelings or process traumas that may otherwise be too personal or painful.
Video by Georgie Pinn, INTERACTOR
ELECTRIC CORPSE: COLLABORATION, CREATIVE AGENCY & MULTI MODAL LEARNING
Building on the success of each project, Georgie went on to create Electric Corpse - an opportunity for children to not just design and animate their characters, but to bring them to life through storytelling, sound effects, motion capture and facial capture, resulting in a unique animated film borne from their creative expression.
“They were learning without realising they were learning, which was really powerful technically and conceptually. There's a lot of potential for this kind of process - you're creating an outcome but along that journey, you're learning a bunch of other things at the same time.”
Video by Georgie Pinn, INTERACTOR
ECHO: EMPATHY, CONNECTION & EQ
Using all that she had learned on the front lines of education, Georgie created Echo, a deep dive into eliciting empathy developed during a residency at QUT.
In this experience, participants enter a booth expecting a photo, but instead embark on a journey guided by an AI character. Participants are prompted to select a face, which tells its story and over time, slowly morphs to become the face of the participant.
“By the end of the story, you’re looking at your face being hijacked by somebody else’s experience. You're intimately connecting with someone you may never meet in real life, so you're immediately opening up your echo chamber of experience.”
The experience allowed people to connect with stories of loss, bullying and identity, with the storytellers, in turn, finding healing in knowing their stories could help others. Echo not only expanded emotional horizons, but global ones - touring the world, winning awards, and creating a cross-cultural archive of stories.
Video by Georgie Pinn, INTERACTOR
EMPATHY, DIGITAL BIAS & AI
In a commission for the World Science Festival, Georgie shifted the focus of her work from empathy between humans to empathy for machines. Taking the content from her archive, she created a projection-mapped display for a 7-meter head as part of a public interactive installation, allowing audience members to capture and project their own face.
“It was interesting work because it was empathy and narcissism - the stories were played at a huge mega scale, so you've got a very intimate story in a very public space.”
With this work, Georgie wanted the audience to reflect on the role of technology in our lives, and how our choices impact digital bias and digital empathy.
“As technology increasingly mirrors us and as AI advances, we must ask ourselves, what values do we want these machines to replicate?”
Video by Georgie Pinn, INTERACTOR
With plenty of exploration still to come, Georgie is a deep believer in the connective power of immersive technology - however asserts that it simply provides a platform for us to tell and listen to stories in new ways.
“There are so many layers and processes of storytelling that we still haven't yet discovered. And it poses the question - can machines teach us to be better humans? Through technology, can we learn to connect and heal rather than isolate? Can it connect us to ourselves on a deeper level through creative expression, or can it help us to connect to others through that empathy?”
“The tech is just the tech. It's nothing without the stories and the user interface design to create powerful experiences for learning, whether it's in the classroom or in life.”
ABOUT GEORGIE PINN
The Founder & Director of INTERACTOR, Georgie Pinn is an interactive creative technologist who makes large-scale multi-sensory art experiences in public space using projection mapping and interactive generative animation. Her creative process is driven by a long term research into how immersive tech and intimate storytelling can be used to connect people, dissolving prejudice, bias and fear through empathy. She has over two decades of experience working as an audiovisual content creator, developing ideas for festivals, cultural institutions, AR and VR experiences, music videos and sets for Theater, Opera and Fashion.
Her artwork has been presented internationally at venues such as the Barbican in London, Drive in Berlin, the Powerhouse in Sydney and Lusail in Qatar. She was awarded the lead commission for Experimenta’s Now or Never music/Arts Fest in Melbourne and won an honorary mention at the world's biggest art and technology festival,' Ars Electronica' in Austria. Her project ECHO picked up the 'Best Interactive Experience award'' at the prestigious Sheffield documentary festival in the UK and went on to tour in South Africa, Singapore and Melbourne.