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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, right,
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
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,
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 these 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 that
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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
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 worked, right? This stuff works.
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And it doesn't really matter
where you're from
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or what age you are,
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it's really evocative.
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Now, don't get me wrong, I am 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
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
the 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 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
that George Zimmerman,
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when he got out of the car,
he cocked his gun
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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
a new form of doing journalism
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that I think is going to join all the
other normal platforms in the future.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)