VR Experience Pitch: Spider
Photo by Pixabay
Written by Verity Borras
Strength: Gets people to engage with a subject they might not normally.
Main Outline:
This will be a first-person virtual reality experience where you are taken through a day in the life of a spider. Through the eyes of a spider in a modern house, the audience will experience how they go about their daily tasks such as making and repairing webs, catching and storing food, eating and cleaning. The spider will be seen by humans who will either try to kill it or put it outside and damage the webs that have been made during the day.
A voice over will guide the audience through the experience as they navigate the house as a spider in this documentary style experience. The narration will include information about the spider’s habits, their habitat, their intelligence, and information about the prevalence of arachnophobia in humans. There will also be details about how many spiders generally live in the average home and how they help humans and the environment in general.
Aside from the narration, the senses in the experience will align with how the spider would experience the world. For example, spiders cannot hear but are excellent at picking up vibrations and have excellent eyesight. Emphasising these sensory differences will give the audience a greater idea of what a spider’s view of the world is and how they differ from our own.
Why would this work for VR?:
This is an interesting idea to take into VR for two reasons: it gives us more insight into a species that is often represented by its worst offenders, the spiders that are venomous and that bite (Cranshaw 2006), and also takes us into a familiar setting, a house, with an unfamiliar perspective. The experience brings the audience through the house through the lens of a spider, which changes the scale of everything we think we are already familiar with. VR has been used to look into the lives of honeybees, as ‘Virtual reality (VR) offers an appealing experimental framework for studying visual performance of insects under highly controlled conditions’ (Schultheiss, et.al 2017). VR being used to conduct research on these small creatures is an indicator that it would also be an excellent way to present the findings to the public.
We are familiar with the presence of spiders in our houses, but we don’t ever get to see the house from their perspective, which is why I believe VR would be an immersive way to achieve this. Media representation of spiders paints them as villains and something to fear, but ‘there is still poor understanding of the role of the media in spreading (mis)information about them’ (Mammola, et.al 2020). How spiders are represented in media contributes to the 21% of British people who suffer from arachnophobia (Raven 2023), and I believe this is because we have not endeavoured to see the world through the eyes of a spider. Doing this through VR could create a sense of empathy, especially if the experience involves the effect of humans on spiders.
Bibliography:
CRANSHAW, Whitney. 2006. ‘Attitudes and Concerns about Spiders Expressed in a Freshman Entomology Class.’ American Entomologist. 52(4). 234-238.
MAMMOLA, Stefano, NANNI, Veronica, PANTINI, Paulo and ISAIA, Marco. 2020. ‘Media framing of spiders may exacerbate arachnophobic sentiments.’ People and Nature, 2(4), 1145-1157.
RAVEN, Peter. 2023. ‘What do Britons say they have a phobia of?’ YouGov [online]. Available at: https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/45297-what-do-britons-say-they-have-phobia [accessed 18/04/2024]
SCHULTHEISS, Patrick, BUATOIS, Alexis, AVARGUES-WEBER, Aurore and GIURFA, Martin. 2017. ‘Using Virtual Reality to Study Visual Performances of Honey Bees’. Current Opinion in Insect Science. December. 43-50.