I am curious if the community knows of or is actively working on VR experiences that promote empathy?
I think that in practice, VR will not promote empathy for the same reason that social networks have not: because status aggrandizing products will be too popular. You already see this in horror games, where they become literally too scary for VR because the lowering of status in transaction feels too real.
Look up the Proteus effect: that will lead to some detrimental things whenever it gets implemented in the social applications that people will come up with. So there will come new Instagrams, and they will be more terrible than the old social networks.
I think Photography and Television and arguably Internet made us more emphatic and open-minded to accept differences, especially when the root cause was ignorance. VR could follow the trend if we can be emerged in places and circumstances we can not physically be in, or if we can see the world through other person eyes.
They let you experience what it's like to be another person via a custom-built video rig (i.e. you get to 'see' the world as another person).
For some reason there's a meme that it will but all the reasons I've seen why VR would also apply to the internet and it doesn't seem to have.
Reality is we don't want more empathy anyway. It's a cancer that stops many good things happening.
My assumption is VR has a comparable or greater impact to conventional video formats.