Behind the Scenes of NYT’s VR Launch

On the weekend of Nov. 7, 2015, “old school” subscribers to The New York Times got a little something extra in their mailboxes.

In a recently announced collaborative project with Google, The Times sent every single one of its home delivery subscribers a virtual reality (VR) headset called Google Cardboard.

Cardboard is a virtual reality headset that, upon proper assembly, docks your smartphone and acts as a pair of goggles that give you access to the VR world. It has been marketed as one of the least expensive and most accessible VR headsets on the market.

And now, every home delivery subscriber of The Times has one. That’s a lot of Cardboard.

The New York Times and Google’s collaborative Cardboard headset. Photo courtesy of Wired.

To launch the Google collaboration, The Times released its own VR smartphone app, NYT VR, ideal for pairing with Cardboard and becoming fully immersed in the “empathy machine.”

Featured on the app are multiple stories told through the VR medium, including projects supported by Vrse, a VR-focused production company that has partnered with Chris Milk, the artist behind music videos for popular entertainers such as Kanye West.

The “headlining” story, however, and the one that most users are presumably focused on as part of the app’s launch, is a project by The New York Times Magazine called “The Displaced.” This 11-minute VR film follows three children whose lives have been uprooted by war and instability in each of their native countries.

Executive editor of The Times Dean Baquet cited “The Displaced” as “the first critical, serious piece of journalism using virtual reality, to shed light on one of the most dire humanitarian crises of our lifetime.”

While families — and namely, children — being displaced globally is absolutely a humanitarian crisis, and The Times did, indeed, create a serious piece of journalism, it wasn’t necessarily the first or most groundbreaking incident of such storytelling.

Besides the fact that “The Displaced” is less of an augmented or virtual reality that one can move into and out of and more of a look-around 360-degree video, there is also the evidence that similar VR journalism efforts precede it.

State and business leaders at the 2015 World Economic Forum view “Clouds Over Sidra” through the Samsung Gear headset. Photo courtesy of the BBC.

Vice News, for instance, teamed up with Vrse to produce the first ever VR broadcast from New York City’s Million March in 2014; Milk did something similar with the VR production company for his projects “Waves of Grace” and “Clouds Over Sidra.”

Examples of similar, animated VR journalism projects include “Harvest of Change” from The Des Moines Register and “Project Syria,” which was produced by Nonny de la Peña and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

So, no, The New York Times is not alone in its recent launch into VR.

But let’s give some credit where credit is due.

“The Displaced” has more of a journalistic focus, compared to other “newsworthy” VR pieces that are available for download. A few specific key elements from the story that I enjoyed were:

• The three-to-four walls of introductory and summary text ensured that I, the user, didn’t have an option but to remain focused on the short sentence or two that was in front of me. Wherever I looked, I found it and could go back to it.
• The 360-degree video was crucial to enhancing my understanding of the vast, intimidating swamp landscape where one young child lives in fear of crocodile attacks.
• Similarly, the well-rounded visual and auditory experience allowed me to feel fully immersed in the Syrian refugees’ scenes; i.e., riding in the back of the truck and gathering cucumbers at the end of the day. I felt as though I was an important character within their stories.
• The 360-degree video’s patched seams were hardly noticeable, especially where the camera had once stood. I saw no evidence of a camera, save for a scene that included lots of shadows, and this only made the experience seem more real.

Overall, it’s hard not to be excited about The New York Times’ recent jump into the VR landscape.

Perhaps even more important is the fact that such a powerful news outlet has gone out of its way to include a large portion of its readership — an invested community capable of giving constructive feedback — in the at-home VR experience.