Will Virtual Reality Reshape Documentary Journalism?
De la Peña has made several immersive virtual-reality documentary films including Project Syria, about refugee children in Syria, which was commissioned by the World Economic Forum, and Hunger in Los Angeles, a film about access to food banks in the U.S. that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012.
“I start with eyewitness video, audio, and photographs and then carefully reconstruct an event with high-end animations, environment models, and spatial soundscapes to create a first-person experience of the events,” De la Peña explains.
New modes of storytelling could have broad cultural and social impact.
De la Peña is a former classmate of Oculus Rift’s creator, Palmer Luckey (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Oculus Rift”). In 2012, the pair studied under Mark Bolas, a researcher who runs the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. Hunger in Los Angeleswas, in fact, created with help from Luckey and other USC students.
De la Peña describes her work as “immersive journalism.” While the work is more challenging than traditional reporting—managing teams of animators, character designers, 3-D modelers, and sound designers—she insists that the medium draws upon the same skills and effort necessary for all strong journalism. “Source material captured at real events is necessary to really make these pieces work,” she says, “and that always takes a lot of time and effort whether you are using traditional news platforms or virtual reality.”
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