A year ago, I posted a piece here on newspapers beginning to embrace Augmented Reality (AR), technology making use of the camera and sensor in your smartphone or tablet to add layers of digital information – videos, photos, and sounds – directly on top of items in your newspaper.
Vancouver-based GVIC Communications Corp., which operates as the Glacier Media Group and owns the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News here in Northern Manitoba, launched Augmented Reality for editorial and advertisements throughout its Lower Mainland media properties in British Columbia in February 2013, teaming up with Dutch businessman Quintin Schevernels’ innovative Layar application, which can be downloaded on your iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. The Winnipeg Free Press also launched its own Augmented Reality (AR) in September 2014 with Blippar, a British first image-recognition smartphone app.
Revisiting the scene a year later, journalism is moving beyond Augmented Reality (AR) and finally to true immersive or Virtual Reality (VR), a tantalizing dream of sci-fi aficionados since the 1950s at least. Remember Virtual Reality (VR), the computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds? Sure you do. Or at least one derivation of it known as simulated reality, as long your virtual memory goes back as far as Sept. 28, 1987 and “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, written by D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, and the first appearance of the Holographic Environment Simulator, better known simply as the “holodeck.”
Data, who was fond of Sherlock Holmes, loved it and in later episodes would often play the 221B Baker Street detective in holodeck programs, often accompanied by Geordi La Forge in the role of Dr. Watson. Prior to the late 24th century, Federation starships were not equipped with holodecks. In 2151, the Starfleet vessel Enterprise NX-01 encountered a vessel belonging to an alien race known as Xyrillians, who had advanced holographic technology in the form of a holographic chamber similar to the holodeck, which Starfleet developed two centuries later. A holo-chamber was also later installed aboard a Klingon battle cruiser, given to the Klingons by the Xyrillians in exchange for their lives.
Here in the 21st century, most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones.
Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback, in medical and gaming applications. As for the origin of the term “virtual reality,” it can be traced back to the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin Artaud and his 1938 book The Theatre and Its Double, where he described theatre as “la réalité virtuelle.”
While newspapers have added a lot of bells and whistles to our various online “platforms” in recent years, they’re not quite at the Holographic Environment Simulator or holodeck reality. Yet. But consider this. In its first Virtual Reality documentary last May, PBS’ Frontline, in an 11-minute immersive effort by filmmaker Dan Edge, took its viewers to the spot under a tree in West Africa, believed to be where the world’s most recent Ebola virus outbreak began in late 2013. The film launched on Google Cardboard, a virtual-reality system that requires an Android smartphone and a simple cardboard viewer. The hand-held box holds a smartphone before the viewer’s eyes. An app presents 360-degree environments, explored as viewers move eyes and heads to explore their surroundings. Frontline collaborated with Secret Location and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University to produce Ebola Outbreak.
Meanwhile,in Santa Monica, California, Nonny de la Peña and her company Emblematic Group are working on a Virtual Reality project for the Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix car race in which not only one, but two “players can experience what it’s like to be in the pit crew and race each other.
De la Peña’s been dubbed the “godmother of Virtual Reality.” She began her journalism career in print and was a correspondent for Newsweek in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but left the news magazine because it didn’t allow her to use the visuals she imagined for a story. For a time, she worked as a documentary filmmaker.
She discovered Virtual Reality through a pair of VR goggles during a trip to Barcelona. “Once I saw that experience, I couldn’t put people out there again,” she told Andreana Young, an editorial assistant at Editor & Publisher magazine, for an Oct. 1 story. “I want to bring them inside the story.” de la Peña said.
Her first Virtual Reality project, called “Hunger in Los Angeles,” illustrated what it’s like to go hungry in Los Angeles, and premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
She worked on the project with Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift headset. Last year, Luckey sold his Virtual Reality platform to Facebook for $2 billion.
Young put on a pair of Emblematic’s VR goggles for her story for a scene from Kiya, a collaborative story between Emblematic Group and Al-Jazeera America. “I stood near a woman on the phone with 911, who was telling the operator her sister, Kiya, was inside the house with her ex-boyfriend. He wouldn’t let her leave and he had a gun,” Young wrote.
“I was able to turn 360-degrees … observing the neighborhood around me. The scene changed, and I was suddenly standing inside the house where Kiya was being held hostage by her ex-boyfriend. I searched the home with my eyes; when I turned around images of baby furniture and a “Family Forever” decal hanging on the wall struck me as I listened to Kiya’s sisters begging her to leave with them.”
Kiya relied heavily on real-life audio recordings obtained from the scene, including 911 calls, and cellphone audio and video recordings and recordings from interviews that provided accounts of what took place.
Virtual Reality creates what developers call a “duality of presence” allowing the viewer to feel like they’re right there in the story, and that can have a greater impact than simply watching video or reading words on a page.
Devices such as Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR have created opportunities for anyone with a smartphone to experience Virtual Reality. By placing a phone with a downloaded VR app onto the front of the device, viewers can watch Virtual Reality content right on their smartphone. On Amazon.com, a Google Cardboard kit costs less than $20. Even a 360-degree Ricoh Theta camera can be purchased for $400.
In September 2014, the Des Moines Register was one of the first newspapers to incorporate Virtual Reality into one of their news stories with its “Harvest of Change” project illustrating the life of today’s American farmer using satellite map imagery, photographs of the farm, the Unity 3D gaming engine, 360-degree video, coders and game designers.
The Associated Press recently announced a new Virtual Reality project called “The Suite Life,” an immersive experience through the Samsung Gear VR headset in which viewers can explore luxury hotel suites.
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