The Future of News? Virtual Reality | Nonny de la Peña | TED Talks

83,544 views ・ 2015-12-15

TED


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00:12
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)
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