'Godmother of VR' sees journalism as the future of virtual reality

Like shoulder pads or frosted hair, virtual reality is often viewed as an relic of the 1980s, but not by former Newsweek reporter Nonny de la Peña.

The Los Angeles-based “Godmother of VR” is at the forefront of an endeavour to use the technology to usher in a form of immersive journalism in which viewers are placed within news stories and experience them viscerally.

Next week, De la Peña will unveil the latest in a series of graphic 3D reconstructions: the story of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old African American fatally shot by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in February 2012.

De la Peña believes the wide availability of VR headsets and the technology to reconstruct events using new computer and film-making techniques could one day transform the world of journalism.

“It creates a real sense of being present on the scene,” she says. “It puts the audience in a place where they can experience the sights, sounds and even emotions as events unfold. This is unlike any other medium.”

Earlier this year, De la Peña’s company, Emblematic, unveiled “Project Syria” at the Sundance festival in Utah. Using a mix of real footage and computer graphics, viewers were placed in a calm Aleppo street scene, a sudden mortar attack, and a camp for refugee children.

The project was not alone in taking virtual reality into real-world stories; others at Sundance recreated Chile’s Caravan of Death in the aftermath of the 1973 coup and the scenes from Iran’s 1979 revolution.

As the technology develops, De la Peña believes, news events will be filmed with 3D, 360-degree cameras. “The audience will not only be in the middle of the story but they’ll be able to move around within it. All of this will be a common part of how journalists make stories in the future.”

Investment in virtual reality devices appears to be accelerating as more VR headsets become available and prices become more affordable. Newly announced models include Sony’s Project Morpheus, high-end phone manufacturer HTC, and Samsung with its smartphone-powered set, Gear VR.

De la Peña’s start in immersive journalism began in 2012 with Hunger, the true story of a diabetic’s collapse due to starvation while waiting in line at a food bank in Los Angeles. Last year, Palmer Luckey, a former Emblematic intern on the Hunger project, sold his prototype VR headset, Oculus Rift, to Facebook for $2bn (£1.34m).

Google is also investing in the field with Cardboard VR goggles; with Magic Leap, developers of technology that imposes images directly into light entering the eye; and with research programmes like Project Tango, which looks at creating a 3D model of the environment around a mobile device.

The technology is likely to go through a period of consolidation in which rival platforms and standards are teased out. But consumers may be justly wary of investing in the hardware if there is little content to enjoy and formats are fragmented.

“There’s huge investment going into merging 3D and CGI technology so I’m not worried about the technology aspect,” De la Peña says. Rather, she believes, it’s going to take new skills to master the form. Immersive journalism, like journalism in general, can be highly subjective and subject to manipulation.

For the Trayvon Martin story, the film-makers did not re-enact the moment the teen was shot since that would rely solely on the witness account of Zimmerman. “We don’t know what happened but we do have tapes of 911 calls and that gives us an opportunity to fact-check source material.”

But will virtual reality be able to overcome the consumer scepticism that was established in 1980s when the technology was in its infancy? Consumer research firm Gartner predicts that 25 million head-mounted VR headsets will be sold worldwide by the end of 2018 and De la Peña believes that emerging consumer generation is as comfortable living on a computer server as it is in reality.

Her own children, she says, are digital natives, and VR technology is already mature enough to be used for non-entertainment purposes. “People thought I was nuts when I started out with this but now it is being recognised as a genuine, serious-issue format.”