VR Diaries: Pearl Harbor Needed More Interviews and Sense of Place

The Pearl Harbor virtual reality piece by USA Today was pretty educational. I think some of the parts that that were the most interesting was when the makers took audiences inside of a submarine and inside an airplane. Being transported into these vehicles gave me mixed emotions. It made me see what Japanese fighters saw inside the submarine and it also took me into an airplane and gave me the sensation that I was up in the air fighting. These were interesting experiences, but at the same time they made me feel a little uneasy knowing the destruction that was caused by similar submarines and airplanes.

This piece didn’t really make me feel like I was transported into Pearl Harbor, which I was really expecting when I found out that my class going to be watching a piece on Pearl Harbor. Since it’s far away and expensive to go to the actual location, I think this piece could have done more to retell what happened on that day. I think that more archival footage could have been used and we should have been transported to the actual location.

The technical aspects were good. The footage was spectacular and had amazing quality. I did like the archival photos that were used, but I think more could have been used. One of the technical aspects that I did not really like were all the advertisements. Like someone else pointed out during the class discussion, it felt like I was in a theatre watching a piece instead of feeling like I was transported somewhere else.

In terms or the narrative, I think that the use of more interviews would have been effective. I would have really liked to hear from Pearl Harbor survivors and it would have been very moving if one of them would have narrated the piece.

If I could give advice to VR journalists, it would be to think of what would be the most effective methods in telling the story. In this case, to tell the story of Pearl Harbor perhaps a documentary would have worked best. VR has the capacity to transport audiences to somewhere where they have never been before. In this case it would have been best if viewers were transported to the actual location because I feel like it was about Pearl Harbor, but I felt like I didn’t see much of the place that was the center of the story. We saw a lot of video of the Pearl Harbor attack recreation but I didn’t feel a sense of the attack.