Why VR?

by Marcelle Hopkins, August 2015

One of my favorite things to do is hand people a Samsung Gear VR headset and watch them experience VR for the first time. The reaction is often childlike, primal. Heads tilt back, mouths gape open, hands reach out to grasp at empty air. Grown men giggle. The verbose are left speechless. No one takes off that headset and shrugs, “Meh.” It’s a profound experience akin to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, when the prisoner understands that he’s been watching shadows instead of three-dimensional beings.

Still, the wow factor is not a good enough reason for us to tell a story in VR. Before beginning “On the Brink of Famine” we needed to answer one very important question: Why VR?

For us, as journalists, the story is always the starting place. We conceived of this project first with the story: Millions of people in South Sudan are going hungry, and parts of the country are on the brink of famine. Why are people starving 2015?

Then we thought about the best way to tell this story. What technology can we deploy in service of the story?

That’s where presence comes in.

One of the most compelling aspects of virtual reality is its power to transport viewers to a place they could not or would not go. VR puts the viewer at the center of the story. And if it’s done well, it creates a feeling of presence — -it makes you feel like you’re there. That feeling of presence often triggers a visceral reaction that conveys more than words and images can. It’s intimate, immediate and emotive.

In the story of how famine happens in South Sudan, place is very important. As Mark Hansen, director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, often says: The place is like a character in this story.

South Sudan is a very lush land, much greener than I expected. Rain drenches the fertile soil for several months every year. There are two growing and harvest seasons. And it’s an agrarian society — -about 85 percent of the population are subsistence farmers. It doesn’t make sense that 4 million people are going hungry.

What I learned in reporting on this crisis since 2013, is that the food crisis is not caused by a natural disaster. It is a man-made catastrophe.

In December 2013, a power struggle between the president Salva Kiir and the former vice president Riek Machar launched South Sudan into civil war.

More than 2 million people have been displaced by the violence. They left behind their houses and jobs, their farms and cattle. They sought safety in the UN camps or in the swamps of the Sudd.

To make matters worse, chronic underdevelopment in South Sudan has made the humanitarian response difficult and expensive. Decades of neglect and structural poverty have left South Sudan without functioning roads, hospitals or state infrastructure that would allow the government and the international humanitarian groups to respond with life-saving aid.

As a result, 3.9 million people are facing severe food shortages, and an estimated 30,000 people are close to starvation. In October 2015 the UN warned that parts of South Sudan were on the brink of famine.

When I was a child in the 1980s, I learned about famine through Ethiopia. I learned that famine is the result of a drought, an unavoidable natural disaster. I thought it just doesn’t rain enough in Africa.

As an adult, I came to understand famine in a different way. Drought can contribute to food insecurity, but it doesn’t have to lead to famine — look at California, for example.

We hope that by taking people to South Sudan through VR, by inducing the presence that only VR offers, this documentary will help viewers better understand the causes of famine and what it looks and feels like for those affected.