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What if I could present you a story

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that you would remember
with your entire body

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and not just with your mind?

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My whole life as a journalist,
I've really been compelled

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to try to make stories
that can make a difference

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and maybe inspire people to care.

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I've worked in print.
I've worked in documentary.

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I've worked in broadcast.

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But it really wasn't until
I got involved with virtual reality

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that I started seeing
these really intense,

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authentic reactions from people

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that really blew my mind.

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So the deal is that with VR,
virtual reality,

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I can put you on scene

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in the middle of the story.

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By putting on these goggles
that track wherever you look,

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you get this whole-body sensation,

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like you're actually, like, there.

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So five years ago was about when
I really began to push the envelope

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with using virtual reality
and journalism together.

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And I wanted to do a piece about hunger.

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Families in America are going hungry,
food banks are overwhelmed,

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and they're often running out of food.

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Now, I knew I couldn't
make people feel hungry,

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but maybe I could figure out a way
to get them to feel something physical.

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So -- again, this is five years ago --

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so doing journalism
and virtual reality together

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was considered
a worse-than-half-baked idea,

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and I had no funding.

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Believe me, I had a lot
of colleagues laughing at me.

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And I did, though,
have a really great intern,

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a woman named Michaela Kobsa-Mark.

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And together we went out to food banks

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and started recording
audio and photographs.

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Until one day she came back to my office

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and she was bawling, she was just crying.

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She had been on scene at a long line,

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where the woman running the line
was feeling extremely overwhelmed,

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and she was screaming,
"There's too many people!

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There's too many people!"

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And this man with diabetes
doesn't get food in time,

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his blood sugar drops too low,
and he collapses into a coma.

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As soon as I heard that audio,

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I knew that this would be
the kind of evocative piece

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that could really describe
what was going on at food banks.

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So here's the real line.
You can see how long it was, right?

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And again, as I said, we didn't
have very much funding,

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so I had to reproduce it
with virtual humans that were donated,

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and people begged and borrowed favors
to help me create the models

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and make things as accurate as we could.

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And then we tried to convey
what happened that day

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with as much as accuracy as is possible.

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(Video) Voice: There's too many people!
There's too many people!

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Voice: OK, he's having a seizure.

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Voice: We need an ambulance.

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Nonny de la Peña: So the man on the right,

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for him, he's walking around the body.

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For him, he's in the room with that body.

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Like, that guy is at his feet.

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And even though,
through his peripheral vision,

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he can see that he's in this lab space,

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he should be able to see
that he's not actually on the street,

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but he feels like he's there
with those people.

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He's very cautious not to step on this guy

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who isn't really there, right?

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So that piece ended up
going to Sundance in 2012,

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a kind of amazing thing,
and it was the first virtual reality film

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ever, basically.

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And when we went, I was really terrified.

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I didn't really know
how people were going to react

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and what was going to happen.

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And we showed up
with this duct-taped pair of goggles.

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(Video) Oh, you're crying.
You're crying. Gina, you're crying.

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So you can hear
the surprise in my voice, right?

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And this kind of reaction ended up being
the kind of reaction we saw

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over and over and over:

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people down on the ground
trying to comfort the seizure victim,

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trying to whisper something into his ear

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or in some way help,
even though they couldn't.

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And I had a lot of people
come out of that piece saying,

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"Oh my God, I was so frustrated.
I couldn't help the guy,"

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and take that back into their lives.

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So after this piece was made,

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the dean of the cinema school at USC,
the University of Southern California,

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brought in the head of the World
Economic Forum to try "Hunger,"

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and he took off the goggles,

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and he commissioned
a piece about Syria on the spot.

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And I really wanted to do something
about Syrian refugee kids,

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because children have been the worst
affected by the Syrian civil war.

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I sent a team to the border of Iraq
to record material at refugee camps,

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basically an area I wouldn't
send a team now,

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as that's where ISIS is really operating.

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And then we also recreated a street scene

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in which a young girl is singing
and a bomb goes off.

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Now, when you're
in the middle of that scene

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and you hear those sounds,

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and you see the injured around you,

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it's an incredibly scary and real feeling.

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I've had individuals who have been
involved in real bombings tell me

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that it evokes the same kind of fear.

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[The civil war in Syria may seem far away]

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[until you experience it yourself.]

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(Girl singing)

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(Explosion)

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[Project Syria]

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[A virtual reality experience]

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NP: We were then invited to take the piece

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to the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London.

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And it wasn't advertised.

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And we were put in this tapestry room.

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There was no press about it,

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so anybody who happened to walk
into the museum to visit it that day

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would see us with these crazy lights.

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You know, maybe they would want to see
the old storytelling of the tapestries.

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They were confronted
by our virtual reality cameras.

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But a lot of people tried it,
and over a five-day run

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we ended up with 54 pages
of guest book comments,

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and we were told by the curators there

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that they'd never seen such an outpouring.

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Things like, "It's so real,"
"Absolutely believable,"

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or, of course, the one
that I was excited about,

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"A real feeling as if you were
in the middle of something

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that you normally see on the TV news."

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So, it works, right? This stuff works.

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And it doesn't really matter
where you're from or what age you are --

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it's really evocative.

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Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying
that when you're in a piece

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you forget that you're here.

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But it turns out we can feel
like we're in two places at once.

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We can have what I call
this duality of presence,

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and I think that's what allows me
to tap into these feelings of empathy.

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Right?

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So that means, of course,

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that I have to be very cautious
about creating these pieces.

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I have to really follow
best journalistic practices

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and make sure that these powerful stories

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are built with integrity.

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If we don't capture
the material ourselves,

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we have to be extremely exacting

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about figuring out the provenance
and where did this stuff come from

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and is it authentic?

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Let me give you an example.

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With this Trayvon Martin case,
this is a guy, a kid,

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who was 17 years old and he bought
soda and a candy at a store,

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and on his way home he was tracked
by a neighborhood watchman

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named George Zimmerman
who ended up shooting and killing him.

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To make that piece,

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we got the architectural drawings
of the entire complex,

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and we rebuilt the entire scene
inside and out, based on those drawings.

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All of the action

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is informed by the real 911
recorded calls to the police.

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And interestingly, we broke
some news with this story.

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The forensic house that did the audio
reconstruction, Primeau Productions,

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they say that they would testify

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that George Zimmerman,
when he got out of the car,

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he cocked his gun before he went
to give chase to Martin.

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So you can see that
the basic tenets of journalism,

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they don't really change here, right?

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We're still following the same principles
that we would always.

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What is different is the sense
of being on scene,

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whether you're watching
a guy collapse from hunger

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or feeling like you're
in the middle of a bomb scene.

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And this is kind of what has driven me
forward with these pieces,

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and thinking about how to make them.

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We're trying to make this, obviously,
beyond the headset, more available.

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We're creating mobile pieces
like the Trayvon Martin piece.

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And these things have had impact.

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I've had Americans tell me
that they've donated,

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direct deductions from their bank account,
money to go to Syrian children refugees.

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And "Hunger in LA," well,
it's helped start

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a new form of doing journalism

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that I think is going to join
all the other normal platforms

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in the future.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)