Virtual Reality: Presence and Empathy

Virtual reality is a new medium that will soon take its place alongside print, radio, film and internet. It will not replace any of these but will occupy a unique and distinct position relative to other media.

Virtual reality brings great promise, as well as challenges, for storytellers. The promise (as we understand it today) can be summed up in two pillars: presence and empathy. Simulating physical presence is a fancy way of saying “we can put you there” wherever there might be. The possibilities for news storytelling are astounding. Imagine being on the caldera of an erupting volcano, in a train station in Hungary, on the frontlines in Kunduz or sitting in the front row while the Pope is addressing Congress.

Empathy as applied to virtual reality is the notion that you can perceive life through someone else’s eyes. Imagine experiencing the Baltimore riots through the eyes of a young black man. Or through the eyes of a police officer serving her community while feeling like her profession is under fire.

These are the pillars of virtual reality that we at Gannett are eager to explore and apply to journalism, news and a new form of immersive, experiential storytelling.

To help grow and facilitate this conversation, Gannett, The Knight Foundation and the New York Television Festival hosted StoryNEXT, a conference dedicated to virtual reality storytelling on October 23rd in New York.

The audience was a unique gathering of people from media, sales & monetization and the vr technology sector. Panels and keynotes covered topics on production, storytelling and advertising.

The key takeaway from the conference was that the industry is hungry for conversation and dialogue. Given the medium is just starting to emerge we all have to band together to share knowledge. Together we need to build an ecosystem (and mainstream consumer audience), create the lexicon of vr storytelling and develop a robust set of best practices. This challenge is enormous, exciting and we are in the game for the long haul.

-Niko Chauls, Director of Applied Technology, Gannett