https://www.ted.com/talks/nonny_de_la_pena_the_future_of_news_virtual_reality/transcript?language=en
The TED talk is about how virtual reality is immersive and is the future of news. It talks about her test project that tried to help people understand hunger by putting them in a place where they watched dropping into a coma from low blood sugar. The scene was made using actual audio and computer graphics grounded in actual visual sources. The viewer can walk around and view the scene from their personal angle. One person who tested the scene started crying and others had similar reactions. Many were upset that they couldn't help the person. The speaker talks about bringing the experience to the public with a bomb scene and the journalistic concern necessary to create the material with a portrayal of the Trayvon Martin case.
The used ethos to establish the liveliness of VR. She talks about all the mediums she's worked in. "I've worked in print. I've worked in documentary. I've worked in broadcast." She's worked in a lot of medium, so she knows about immersing people and she knows about journalism, and she's knows it when she says that VR is an immersive, successful way to do news.
She also uses pathos when she tells us how it would feel to be at a certain place and how it would feel to experience it in VR. "For him, he's in the room with that body."
She also uses some first hand testimony with the references to the reactions she got and all the comments. She also talked about the person who experienced a bomb and said that the bomb scene was a faithful recreation.
I picked it because, well, it was the first on the list, but also, it looked cool. Virtual Reality is cool, and I think it's also the future. It's simply superior to regular screens, especially when people are giving full attention to the experience. I've had some experience with VR news because I've used the 360 videos on youtube where you can use the gyroscope to look around, and I've done the same today. It's cool, but the speaker was right when she said that people were frustrated they couldn't help the dying man. It would be so much stronger with videogames than simply videos. It's also important, I think, to move around and control the perspective of the scene. Youtube can't do that now, so it's very restrictive, but still cool.
It's really odd to wonder what parts of the VR experience are novelty and which are going to last. Like the wish to interfere. We don't have that in movies. Well, I have it, but it's not as strong, or we learn to deal with it (except for those people who shout at the screen). Will the desire to intervene persist as part of the nature of VR, or will we learn to be passive in our role.
It is good that she talked about journalistic integrity because as we went along, I grew concerned. The thing about 3D space is that you have to construct everything. If details are missing, too bad, something has to be there; a blur will take you out of the experience, you have to deduce what the detail was. It's upscaling. Like from the Hobbit books to the movies (gods I wish it could be singular), Thranduil is not mentioned much, but his atmosphere and impression he makes is, and so all the objects, his clothes, his hair, his face, his throne, his room, you have to make them out of thin air to create that effect. Of course, news can't make it up, so they have to do extensive research, but I'm not sure it's feasible for them to do this. I think it might work if they had a series of cameras all over an area to get all the angles and have a software that able to compile them and smooth the edges, but hand making scenes isn't fast or big enough for it to be the future. You have to start off with all the material that's necessary to make the picture, it's to hard to build the picture from fragments.
It's kind of odd to hear her using ethos to make us feel how immersive VR is. It's like Blu-ray commercials on DVD, like, crap, I can't show it to you. But our imaginations are good enough to make it work. On the other hand, her sell is kind of predicated on the idea that our imagination isn't enough. Like, yeah, you're working hard right now to imagine what it's like to be in Syria, but just put on VR, and you won't have to try anymore. We'll spoon feed the experience to you. That might be dangerous now that I think of it. What if we can't empathize with people unless we can feel like we're there.
