Paint with Me: Stimulating Creativity and Empathy While Painting with a Painter in Virtual Reality

While nothing can be more vivid, immediate and real than our own sensorial experiences, emerging virtual reality technologies are playing with the possibility of being able to share someone else's sensory reality. The Painter Project is a virtual environment where users see a video from a painter's point of view in tandem with a tracked rendering of their own hand while they paint on a physical canvas. The end result is an experiment in superimposition of one experiential reality on top of another, hopefully opening a new window into an artist's creative process. This explorative study tested this virtual environment on stimulating empathy and creativity. The findings indicate potential for this technology as a new expert-novice mentorship simulation.