A journey to a refugee camp
Today, after work, I travelled to a refugee camp in Jordan. There, I met a young Syrian girl named Sidra.
Sidra was sitting there right in front of me on a mattress, legs crossed. I looked around the room. It was too small for her large family. There was no beds, no real furniture. Her entire family were having dinner right next to me, on the floor.
I heard some giggling and turned around. Her baby brother ran out of the door behind me. Sidra told me, that she hiked through the desert in Jordan to get here. They have been living in this camp for one and half years.
Then, she took me outside. I saw a queue of elementary school girls and boys marching next to me by a long barb-wired fence. A girl walked closer and reached out her arm. She had a big smile on her face.
Suddenly, I found myself standing on the dusty playground, under the gloomy sky covered by dark clouds. I was surrounded by a group of little kids who were just at my knee heights. I turned around and around. Every direction, they were jumping up and down, just within my arm’s reach.
For a flip second, I felt strangely close to them.
I heard Sidra’s voice: “My teacher says the cloud moving above us also came from Syria. Someday, the cloud and me are going to turn around, and go back home…”
With that, the campground I was standing on faded into a complete darkness. Her voice echoed in the void.
I put down what I was holding in my hands, a simple, foldable Google Cardboard, and found myself right in the middle of my room in San Francisco. I stood there, felt disoriented, as if I just woke up from a dream.
It took me a long time to completely return to my own reality — A tech girl living in the hustle and bustle of San Francisco, thousands of miles away from that barren desert of Jordan. Somehow, I couldn’t stop thinking of Sidra. Something was hauntingly captivating in that virtual world. I felt a strange presence of her around me. It is almost like she was only a few feet away.
This was my very first experience with Virtual Reality. I was overwhelmed by the magic of VR, to teleport us to a world beyond our reach. The beautiful irony here is that the virtual world we find ourselves standing in, is the real world for someone else, someone so untouchably remote from us. VR gives us the power to transcend time and space, and at the same time, transcend our emotions. For the first time, I felt that someone that far away could be this close to me.
Sidra is the main character of the VR documentary “Clouds over Sidra”. The film is one of the first documentaries created by the pioneer VR producer Chris Milk. He partners with the United Nation to make 360 degree movies, and captures the lives of many who struggles in the world in a brutally honest way. He wants to show these films to people who have the power to change the lives of those in the films. He is aspired to use VR to build ultimate empathy among human being.
What Chris produces is only the tip of the iceberg. Even though for many people, Virtual Reality is still just a fancy nerdy term to immersive online gaming, it has quietly travelled far beyond that. Virtual reality starts expanding its reach into many fields where imagination and immersive experience make a powerful statement. If we are to imagine the future of journalism, filming, education, architecture, art, virtual reality may be the disruptive force to revolutionize the way we experience the world, create and communicate. It may create the ultimate sense of presence that no other traditional media could compete.
Indeed, we still have a long way to go. For the most part, many people’s first reaction when trying a low-end VR device (eg. Google cardboard), is the unnegligible dizziness created by the latency of the videos. However, as a strong believer of Moore’s law, I could see many affordable consumer VR devices will appear right around the horizon as the hardware technology advances and price lowers. That day may be the starting point of something truly game-changing, just as the early days when mobile developers first realizes that smartphone was a “pretty cool” platform.
For now, VR is still the wild west of the tech world mostly dominated by the pioneers who live and think years ahead of the rest. It is a ground where the future is unclear, countless battles will be fought, and heroes may emerge. But is also a ground of hope. If we are searching for a piece of technology that will bring us the super power to teleport beyond our physical constraints, to transcend space, time, and to build the ultimate emotional connections among billions of us on this planet, we may already be well on our way to have a pretty good answer.
— 02/06/2016, New Orleans
