Nonny de la Peña: Journalist. Virtual reality pioneer. Occasional painter.
De la Peña is the founder and CEO of Emblematic Group, a company focused on immersive, journalistic storytelling based in Los Angeles.
She's originally from California, and went to Harvard University where she majored in sociology and visual and environmental studies. She worked as a journalist for years, including as a correspondent for Newsweek.
After building a version of Guantanamo Bay Prison on Second Life eight years ago, she started thinking how VR could be used to tell news stories.
While collaborating on a project at the University of Barcelona, she got to try a piece dealing with the bystander effect that put the viewer in the middle of a bar fight. Since then, De la Peña's worked to create immersive narratives in VR.
Hunger in Los Angeles took two years to build and $700 of De la Peña's own money. The prototype she used came from USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, specifically Mark Bolas, now-Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, Thai Phan, and Evan Suma.
The piece premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. Actor Gina Rodriguez, who won the 2014 Golden Globe for best actress for her CW show Jane the Virgin, stopped by.
"I didn't know how people were going to behave and that moment when the goggles came off and she was bawling—you could hear her voice and it's just like, 'You're crying, oh my God, you're crying,'" De la Peña said, "That's happened over and over again and that's the moment where I'm like 'I'm really on to something.'"
See the full story here; http://www.techrepublic.com/article/nonny-de-la-pena-journalist-virtual-reality-pioneer-occasional-painter/