I’m a captive audience in this immersive world.
You’ve got my attention.
Don’t squander it.
Welcome.
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Virtual and augmented reality platforms
are sweeping the world of gaming.
There are games that go deep,
and create richly immersive virtual worlds.
And there are games that go wide,
augmenting the real world
and making the game appear anywhere you go.
In 2016 alone, about 2.3 billion dollars in investment
poured into companies working on virtual
and augmented reality platforms.
For some, it’s a bet that the technology
is poised to cross the threshold from toy to tool.
Turning the world into a screen
may sound like a dystopia to some.
“They called our generation the missing millions.”
But backers of the technology say
there could be something irresistible
in a device that displays facts you need to know,
right when you need to know them, right before your eyes.
So many things that we now have anxiety around,
about our interaction with the physical world,
will just stop being an issue.
You’re at a water park,
and you don’t know where your child is.
With a wearable device,
you can see them, through buildings, through anywhere,
they’re over here, they’re over there.
And what about more complex facts?
Some journalists say immersive storytelling
could be a powerful way
to capture attention of news audiences,
so they don’t just think about events,
but experience them.
How am I going to stay relevant,
and get you to care about stories that
are on the other side of the world,
that you’ve started to block out?
I look at these immersive storytelling platforms
as the next step in the evolution of journalism.
One of the most straightforward methods
simply allows viewers to look around.
“On a rooftop above Falluja,
an Iraqi sniper takes careful aim at an ISIS soldier.”
When the New York Times’ Ben Solomon
rode along with Iraqi special forces liberating Falluja in 2016,
he took a 360-degree camera.
The result was a mix of war reporting that you’d see on TV,
alongside moments of something unmistakably new.
These are the cells where ISIS would hold their prisoners.
As the door shuts, the freedom to direct your own gaze
emphasizes the confinement of the space
in way that a fixed perspective just can’t.
The fact, here, is something you feel.
So, as a journalist,
you're always trying to give people
what Martha Gellhorn called
“the view from the ground.”
But with virtual reality, now,
I'm asking my audience to do something
much more intense.
I'm asking them to be on-scene,
to take me out of the picture,
and become the witness themselves.
Nonny De la Peña and her collaborators
are going further than 360 video,
creating densely-researched projects
that let viewers explore a street bombed in Syria,
or fly above a melting glacier in Greenland.
We use Google Maps.
We use photographs. We use video.
We're very thorough, and very careful,
to use the real source material to inform what we build.
All that material helps recreate experiences
like this one, with Frontline,
which takes viewers inside a solitary confinement cell,
alongside a man who spent years living in one.
“So, you know, I would take blood
and I would write messages
all over my cell, you know, help me.”
The screen disappears. You're no longer separated
from the material that you're looking at.
You're inside the story.
And that gives you this incredible feeling of presence.
A feeling like your whole body's on-scene,
and you're witnessing an event
as it really unfolds around you.
“I cut myself thousands of times.
Just over, and over, and over, and over.”
This immersive project, created by
conflict photographer Karin Ben Kehlifa,
is even more interactive.
It draws on interviews with fighters
on opposite sides of conflicts
in Israel and Palestine, El Salvador,
and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Those who attacked us
killed my mother and my father
right before my eyes.
The project, called "The Enemy,”
transforms the source material
into digital avatars of each man.
They can appear in an entirely virtual space,
or inside your living room, with the aid of a phone.
It doesn't feel seamlessly real,
but it's still gripping to share their space
and listen to them, as their eyes follow you around the room.
When you listen to those fighters,
realize what they’ve been through,
how much hope they still have,
how much humanity they still carry.
When people go in, they know those fighters exist.
They even have a memory of having met those fighters
once they come out from there.
And I can see that some people are very emotional
when they leave this, this experience.
But some critics worry that more emotion
may be the last thing we need in news.
Today, faith in the press has eroded,
at the same time new platforms
enable new ways to push our buttons,
with fake news stories,
videos that can make anyone say anything,
and outlets that whip up feelings
to reinforce particular points of view.
If a fake Facebook post can trick you now,
imagine what an immersive storytelling
piece could do to you, right?
The moment at which our bodies and our minds
really believe we are someplace else,
that is an experience that really threatens
deliberation and judgment.
One bad scenario is that everything becomes
even more about confirmation bias,
and people will just completely disconnect from
anybody who doesn't already agree with them.
If we are using media to create multiple
and competing social realities,
then we are imperiling the future of what counts as a fact.
Whether you’re talking about screens
that replace reality entirely,
or ones that simply augment
what you’re seeing everywhere,
what feels new here is the degree
to which this form of communication
could short-circuit judgment
by getting right in your face.
Yet there are precedents for this.
There are certain things that have a
particular ability to capture our attention.
And, you know, today that’s the screen,
but the first iteration was the poster.
The poster, when it came, out was a sensation.
Especially in the late 19th century, in France,
when they started using bright colors,
moving images, sexy women.
People were astonished,
they couldn’t believe this thing.
They said, you know,
it controls the mind,
it’s out of control.
There’s still pretty strenuous laws,
even in New York City,
as to where you can have posters.
That’s why there aren’t that
many eye-level posters in New York.
You may not realize that, they’re usually up.
It’s because they banned posters
being right in your face at all times.
People worry that, if we're giving people
an embodied experience, that it's a subjective experience,
and it can't have the transparency and authenticity
that journalism has before it.
VR will be used for propaganda.
It will be used badly for journalism.
It'll be used for incredible films.
But that's always going to be about, who's the maker?
And it's not about the medium.
And that could mean that the best defense we have
against manipulated facts on immersive platforms
may well be the same non-technological defenses
we’ve been using all along.
When misinformation comes,
journalists need to be there, to be like,
“Okay. You know me. You know me.
You can trust me. You know my track record.
You know my credibility. You know my history.
You know my values and what I stand for.
That is fake.
That is real.”
Every information technology
comes with this twin possibility
of greater education and information,
but greater capacity to manipulate and deceive.
The technology it takes to seize
people’s attention, and make them pay attention to facts,
has always been a double-edged sword.
And it seems every era’s next layer of innovation
ends up making that sword a little bit bigger.
So, you know, once upon a time, the persuaders
were, basically, out on the street,
in posters, maybe the town crier.
Then it slowly moved into the house,
that was radio and the television.
Then it came closer to us,
with the phone and the computer screen.
Now, the future is one where
maybe it’s all over your body,
even close to your eyeballs, maybe
plugged into your brain, you know?
So it’s getting closer and closer and closer to us.
So where is the future of fact in this medium?
We’re just barely getting a glimpse
of what it’s going to look like.