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Will we become more human as the bounds between real and not dissolve?<\/strong><\/p>\n About a year ago, I drove up from New York to Cambridge, over potholes and through rainstorms and all the difficulties of the messy present, to experience a possible version of the future. My destination was a conference called Virtually There at MIT, about virtual reality documentaries and the field of immersive journalism, which its proponents believe has the potential to upend not only storytelling but how we connect with each other, and even how we understand ourselves. This is the promise, at least. It\u2019s early days. On the conference\u2019s program there was a quote from Werner Herzog: \u201cIn the case [of virtual reality] we do have a technology, but we don\u2019t have any idea how to fill it with content.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2016, $2.3 billion was invested in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) companies \u2014 three times the amount invested in 2015. SuperData Research, a firm that studies these trends, estimated that by the end of 2016 \u2014 by which point two much-anticipated headsets were finally released, the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift (which Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg paid $2 billion to acquire in 2014) \u2014 6.3 million VR headsets had been delivered. And that number doesn\u2019t even include the 10 million-plus more simplistic Cardboard viewers Google shipped out during that same period, prompting, to date, over 160 million downloads of Cardboard apps on Google Play. Meanwhile, journalism has cottoned on. Time Inc. launched Life VR, which produces content for the company\u2019s various magazine brands. The New York Times, an early adopter, debuted its VR app in 2015 \u2014 it\u2019s since been downloaded more than 1.2 million times. The Tribeca Film Festival first incorporated VR in 2013; by 2017, the festival included 23 VR films. All of which helps explain how it is that Goldman Sachs\u2019s conservative estimate of the industry’s likely annual revenue in 2025 is $80 billion. (For reference, in 2016, global box office revenue from the film industry was just over $38 billion.) Their non-conservative estimate is $182 billion.<\/p>\n Back in the lobby of MIT\u2019s Media Lab building, dozens of people sat on rotating stools wearing bulky goggles, their heads twisting around at random intervals, like baby birds. Two exhibits by the entrance featured large screens that enabled onlookers to view what nearby VR users were seeing. At one, a woman was using hand-held controls to explore a black light-esque rendition of the brain\u2019s neuron circuitry. Across from her, a man was navigating the barren landscape of Mars. \u201cWe presented it last week to Congress!\u201d said Julian Reyes, a VR producer at media company Fusion, now Splinter, which created the piece. \u201cThe director of NASA was there, and the deputy director\u2014she played for 20 minutes!\u201d Then he pulled up his cell phone\u2014the display was shattered. \u201cYeah, I dropped it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt only fell like one foot, maybe two.\u201d And just like that, the dream of perfect technological progress was brought back to earth.<\/p>\n Those compositions could be described as educational adventures, but many others at the conference\u2014the majority, in fact\u2014were engaged in helping users understand other people\u2019s experiences, particularly painful ones. One was about a famine in South Sudan, another was about a survivor of the 2005 London train bombings. The goal of these works\u2014helping people relate to experiences not their own\u2014isn\u2019t all that different from that of many traditional documentaries, or novels for that matter. But advocates believe VR, as it\u2019s known, has a unique power. \u201cIt\u2019s a machine,\u201d proclaimed Chris Milk, one of narrative VR\u2019s best known creators, in a talk at the 2015 TED conference. \u201cBut through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic. Ultimately, we become more human.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet even as the field is awash in a heady blend of ambition, hype and hope, with Goldman Sachs estimating that by 2025 it will be producing $80 billion in revenue, and one person telling me working in the industry was \u201clike holding onto a rocket ship heading into space,\u201d it also includes people like Janet Murray, who studies digital storytelling at Georgia Tech and takes a gleeful pleasure in bringing the industry\u2019s more hyperbolic claims down to size. \u201cRight now, the platforms are still in the experimental stage and God knows if any of them will make money,\u201d she said at the conference. \u201cWhich doesn\u2019t mean the medium isn\u2019t real! But you don\u2019t get empathy by putting on a helmet and looking at another person. You get empathy by being in a structured story environment.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the more meaningful question, though, isn\u2019t whether there is an automatic connection between VR and empathy, but whether the medium, when used in certain \u201cstructured story environments,\u201d amplifies and channels empathy in unprecedented ways. One argument that it can came in the form of a sophisticated piece at Virtually There at MIT, The Enemy<\/a>, created by former war photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, which places you in a room with a real Israeli soldier, referred to as Gilad, and Palestinian soldier, Abu Khaled, as they respond to a series of open-ended questions\u2014What does peace mean to you? What are you fighting for? To experience it I had to don not just goggles and enormous headphones but a backpack carrying a heavy computer. (Most VR is accessible via any VR headset and allows users to perceive 3D imagery but not move through it; The Enemy<\/a> was volumetric, meaning you could walk around \u201cinside\u201d the environment and requires not just one of the more sophisticated headsets, like the $800 Vive, but also that it be attached to a computer.)<\/p>\n The gear was awkward and at first it felt more than anything like being in a lucid dream, where you have an unexpected freedom of motion yet nothing has the real weight of matter. But soon this disembodied feeling subsided. I forgot I was in a hotel conference room. I saw only the two men, standing at opposite sides of the room, their chests moving up and down as they breathed. They were dressed differently; Abu Khaled in camo and wearing a hood that obscured most of his face, Gilad in his green army uniform. But each followed me with their eyes as they offered strikingly similar answers to the same questions, jutting their heads back if I got too close. By the end, the piece\u2019s immersive realness had transformed what could have been a pat statement about shared humanity into one that sunk in and stayed.<\/p>\n The Enemy was completed in the spring of 2014, at which point Gilad and Abu Khaled, who never met in real life, had the chance to view it themselves. That July, the ceasefire between Palestine and Israel disintegrated, and war raged for seven weeks, leaving thousands dead. Once the fighting subsided, Khelifa got news about Abu Khaled, who had survived but was injured, and subsequently reached Gilad by phone. \u201cWe talked for a bit, and then he asked, \u2018How is Abu Khaled? Is he okay?\u2019\u201d said Khelifa. \u201cThat is the impact you want to have.\u201d<\/p>\n The story about the current explosion of interest in VR usually begins with Palmer Luckey, a homeschooled tech savant with a penchant for going barefoot who launched a Kickstarter for Oculus, in 2012, when he was 19, asking for $250,000, within a month raised $2.4 million, and then sold the company to Facebook in July of 2014 for $2 billion. But while this story isn\u2019t wrong, it\u2019s incomplete, since it leaves out a woman, Nonny de la Pena, who in 2011 produced what is widely regarded as the first piece of \u201cimmersive journalism\u201d (she coined the term), Hunger in Los Angeles. In it, animated characters stand in line outside a soup kitchen that has run out of food as real audio plays\u2014you watch as a man collapses in a diabetic seizure.<\/p>\n It would be hard to overstate that piece\u2019s influence. Awareness of VR originally began to trickle into the general consciousness in the early \u201890s, prompted by the first VR arcade games, headsets like Nintendo\u2019s Virtual Boy, and the entertainingly terrible movie Lawnmower Man (in which VR enables a dolt to become an evil genius who uses telekinesis to explode floppy discs and commit murder via lawnmower). But after Virtual Boy flopped, along with Sega\u2019s VR headset, VR retreated back to scientist\u2019s labs. By the early 2010s, VR was still generally assumed to just be a tool for gaming or military training. With Hunger, however, De la Pena showed it could be a powerful tool to bring attention to realities that are more comfortable to ignore\u2014to boost empathy, in other words.<\/p>\n For Hunger’s premiere, at Sundance in January of 2012, Luckey, then a part-time employee at the University of Southern California, where De la Pena was a research fellow, built an early, duct taped version of what would become Oculus (festival goers used it to watch the piece), and crashed in her hotel room. Hunger soon became the first work of VR experienced by everyone from Milk, whose best known VR piece addresses the Syrian refugee crisis, to Ingrid Kopp, who as the director of Tribeca Film Institute’s Digital Initiatives incorporated VR into the film festival in 2013.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s the godmother, of course, it\u2019s not even a question,\u201d said Raney Aronson, the executive producer of Frontline, PBS\u2019s investigative journalism series, who recently worked with De la Pena on a VR piece about solitary confinement. \u201cThis whole VR revolution, basically, came about because of her,\u201d said Linc Gaskin, the founder of VR production company 8i.<\/p>\n The schedules of most everyone I met in VR had a frenzied quality and De la Pena, who speaks in a rapid fire staccato and has a brain that processes information at breakneck speed, is no exception. A few days before the conference I had arrived at the squat Culver City building that houses her company, Emblematic, only to discover that her previous appointment had run over, leaving her late to a call with a venture capital company (she missed it) then racing to Beverly Hills for a meeting with media company Fusion to discuss a virtual reality channel. \u201cAnother fucking crazy day in VR-landia,\u201d De la Pena said by way of introduction.<\/p>\n Milk and Luckey remain better known than De la Pena, maybe because they have had more overt commercial success (De la Pena, who maxed out her credit cards to produce Hunger, still lives in a modest Mar Vista bungalow with, ironically, an enormous relic of an antenna on top) or because of her gender. \u201cIs it good to be called tenacious?\u201d she wondered aloud when I asked how she\u2019s treated as a woman in the field. But since Hunger, De la Pena has worked at a feverish pace, and produced numerous other seminal pieces. (No one really knows what to even call narrative VR productions yet: \u201cPieces? Experiences? The vernacular is still being invented,\u201d De la Pena said. \u201cJust don\u2019t call them videos.\u201d)<\/p>\n