Why virtual reality might be the antidote to ‘post-truth’ and clickbait
If 2016 is the year of post truth, where appeals to emotion are more influential than objective facts, is it then paradoxical to say that it has also been the year where truth has become king?
People are now being given the opportunity to see objective facts through virtual reality technology, being affected emotionally and being allowed to make up their own mind based on experience rather than an election campaign soap box.
Ever since Chris Milk dropped the phrase into his TED talk, virtual reality has been supported for being an ‘empathy machine’ — one out of every six people who saw Milk’s Unicef film Clouds Over Sidra donated, and companies have sprung up promising to deliver VR content that puts you inside a subject.
My own company, VR City, has done just that. With our documentaries, Invisible and Witness 360: 7/7, we connect people to stories in a distinctly deeper, and we believe, transformative way.
The power of VR is that you can fully immerse viewers and let them explore and decide what to think based not on exaggerated hyperbole but an unfettered visual and audio experience.
A solution to clickbait?
Could this be the antidote to post truth and other scourges of honest reporting, like clickbait? This is an opportunity to elicit empathy in people, educate them and ultimately connect them to what is actually happening in the world.
With this foundation, VR has become the new medium for pioneering global news brands and will lead to an evolution of journalism. VR doesn’t just bring you closer to the story; it puts you inside it. It becomes not something you watch but something you experience, and that is why VR will revolutionize how we consume news. More than ever before we need a medium that exposes post truth for what it really is.
In November 2015 the New York Times made the bold step into VR by giving out 1.3 million Google Cardboards to its subscribers for free. More than 600,000 of them then downloaded the accompanying app and have since received VR content on subjects as far reaching as the global refugee crisis, the US presidential campaign and the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks.
Producing films in keeping with and accompanying the paper’s editorial, the New York Times is successfully putting people inside the stories of our time and encouraging them to connect with subjects they could otherwise be detached from.
Where traditional 2D video is often created to hold our attention for no more than 60 seconds, the New York Times provides experiences that demand our time and require our focus.
What these films deliver is a connection with a person or a topic that builds understanding and compassion that would otherwise be lost in the noise of browser tabs, pop up ads and headline grabbing proclamations
360 as a ‘transportation device’
This last point is something that Bryn Mooser and David Darg had in mind when they set up their production company Ryot in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti. Since 2015 their focus has been on VR news coverage and humanitarian advocacy, where they describe the 360 camera as a ‘transportation device’.
Mooser and Darg have an ambition for Ryot to become “the world’s largest 360° news network” and the Huffington Post are helping make this a reality, buying Ryot in 2016. Their films have taken viewers to the aftermath of the Nepalese earthquake in “The Nepal Quake Project”, the war torn streets of Aleppo in Welcome to Aleppo, the shores of the Mediterranean in The Crossing, the Calais Jungle in Seeking Home and most recently to Haiti in After The Storm.
Each of these films strive to remove the objectivity of traditional video journalism and virtually place the viewer inside the story. Once there, the viewer is able to take time to see for themselves what is going on in places they may otherwise have just heard or read about, often so regularly that they run the risk of becoming desensitized.
This immersion in a virtual environment leads to a degree of attention, a sense of presence and ultimately to a level of empathy that was rarely achieved before. Ryot’s films are simple, often just four or five shots with a voice over, but they unfailingly connect you to the story and when an event becomes as relatable as actually feeling like you’re part of it… then that’s pretty powerful.
Other news brands to follow Ryot and the New York Times into VR have been The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Economist, USA Today and Time.
Fifty photojournalists have been given 360 video cameras to fuel Focus 360, Reuters’s new VR news portal.
This is a definite ground swell that also serves to remind us that VR is still shot and produced by individuals from news brands with their own inherent point of view. So can they be entirely objective?
Perhaps not, but the medium is opening the door to far more candid renderings of the stories of our time, where we are being offered a return ticket to places we have otherwise only seen in a 16:9 frame.
If it can provide a viable antidote to the cynicism of post truth and video click bait then VR already has a major feather in its cap.
