At Texas Arts And Tech Fest, Virtual Reality Is Perfectly Human

Niki Smit is the co-director of 'Soul Paint,' a VR experience that lets users draw their emotions on their body (Credit: AFP)

At South by Southwest -- the gargantuan Texas festival for cinema, music and tech -- artists this year embraced virtual reality as a way to better connect with humanity, not escape it.

VR and augmented reality are often associated with video gaming, or the groundbreaking hardware races underway between tech titans like Apple and Meta -- though with little in the way of mass adaptation.