Where It Started, Where It’s Headed
In January 2012, journalist Nonny de la Peña arrived in Park City, Utah, with the goal of introducing her latest project: a virtual reality experience called “Hunger in Los Angeles.” Compared to the polished movies being shown for the Sundance Film Festival, de la Peña’s setup was decidedly modest: a pair of headphones and a set of goggles that had been designed and duct-taped together by her intern, a 19-year-old California State University student named Palmer Luckey.
It was a moment that de la Peña, a former Newsweek reporter, had been dreaming about for years. She had poured so much time and money into the project, in fact, that she was nearly broke.
The screening went exceptionally well. Viewers left the experience intrigued by “Hunger,” which placed them in line at a Los Angeles food bank, watching as a man collapses from a diabetic attack. Some users were shaken; others were crying; many reported feeling empathy for the subjects. By immersing the user into another world, “Hunger,” it was clear, went beyond a traditional documentary.
While de la Peña would go on to create other experiences — including ones on domestic violence and the conflict over abortion rights that would be among more than 30 VR experiences exhibited at the 2016 Sundance festival — her intern, Luckey, was refining his virtual reality headset. In August 2012, he started a Kickstarter campaign for Oculus Rift, hoping to raise $250,000. It easily topped that goal, pulling in nearly $2.5 million and more than 9,500 backers. A year and a half later, before he had even brought a consumer version to the market, Luckey sold the company to Facebook for $2 billion.
Today, Google, Samsung, HTC, Sony and other companies have been working on their own headsets. Industry analysts are predicting that up to 34 million headsets will be sold in 2020. By 2020, Digi-Capital predicts that the augmented and virtual reality market may reach $150 billion in sales. One small company, Quantum Bakery, had a successful Kickstarter campaign for a mobile phone case that pops up into a VR viewer; it plans to release the device in 2016.
Traditional news outlets, some keen to avoid repeating their slow adoptions of the Internet and mobile devices, have begun experiments in virtual reality and 360-degree videos. In September 2014, The Des Moines Register (a property of USA TODAY NETWORK, a collaborator on this report) launched “Harvest of Change,” which immersed the viewer in the world of an Iowa farming family, and later streamed live spherical video of 19 presidential candidates speaking at the Iowa State Fair. That combined work by the Register and USA TODAY NETWORK’S Product Division was recognized by the National Press Foundation in 2016 with its first award for best use of technology in journalism.
In April 2015, The Wall Street Journal debuted a virtual reality “roller coaster” following the ups and downs of the Nasdaq; in June 2015, the BBC created a 360-degree video showing life in a Syrian migrant camp in northern France; and in September 2015, PBS’s “Frontline” shared “Ebola Outbreak” at the Online News Association conference in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times followed with its VR visit to Mars, and Vrse, a virtual reality company founded by filmmaker Chris Milk, partnered with The New York Times and the United Nations for VR features. In November 2015, the Times distributed 1.3 million Google Cardboard viewers so its subscribers could download an app and watch “The Displaced,” a spherical video about three refugee children.
Newer and smaller journalism outlets have tackled virtual reality in their own ways. Fusion, a company formed by Univision and Disney-ABC Television Group, released an innovative video that allowed users to swim with whales. RYOT, a new media outlet that seeks to motivate readers to become involved with various causes, built virtual reality experiences around prisons, the United States-Mexico border and the April 2015 Nepal earthquake.
Despite the experimentation, it’s clear that virtual reality is merely in the beginning stages. Immense challenges remain: The consumer market remains incredibly small, with manufacturers still working on creating headsets that are high-quality, reasonably priced and do not give users motion sickness. Without market penetration, of course, revenue for content producers will remain elusive.
Production of top-flight content is also expensive; the cost of cameras, computer processing power and software can easily price out small outlets.
Filmmakers, meanwhile, are exploring new rules and methods when it comes to virtual reality and 360-degree videos: Should the camera operator and the director be in the shot? How do you get viewers to explore the virtual space and provide a meaningful narrative?
When it comes to the potential of virtual reality, media outlets range from skeptical to bullish. “I think VR will eventually be a major platform provided the public adopts it at a steady rate,” said Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the managing editor of digital at The Washington Post. “But as we have seen with 3-D TV and Google Glass, this is hardly a given.” Or, as Jessica Yu, deputy managing editor and global head of visuals at The Wall Street Journal, put it: “I wouldn’t go so far as to say VR is the future of journalism just as I wouldn’t have said that TV, radio or photography was ever the ‘future of journalism’ in their early days. Undoubtedly, they were revolutionary and allowed additional facets of stories to suddenly become more real to audiences, but it’s not like they ever wiped out one form of journalism or another as a whole.”
After the release of “The Displaced” by The New York Times, Michael Oreskes, the senior vice president of news and editorial director of NPR, wrote a memo to his staff stressing the need to balance innovation with fundamental journalistic practices. “In this V.R. experiment we should applaud, and even emulate, the effort while also studying the details of execution,” Oreskes wrote. “. . . As we experiment with these new forms we must take care that our excitement with what new technology lets us do doesn’t cause us to lose sight of good standards we bring with us from the old forms.”
The believers, though, think that the public will adopt virtual reality and that news outlets would be wise to get on board. “This is the dawn of a new medium that will have a profound effect on news and journalism,” said Niko Chauls, the director of applied technology at USA TODAY NETWORK. “We will be able to put our consumers on the frontlines of wars, in refugee camps, or on the red carpet at the Oscars. They can experience being racially profiled, sitting in the State of the Union, or attending political conventions.”
Molly Swenson, the chief operating officer of RYOT, agrees. “Virtual reality affords us the opportunity to see the world through a fresh pair of eyes,” she said. “You are seeing, hearing and sensationally stepping inside a moment, a place, a community other than your own. It breaks down barriers like nothing else.”
