Five years ago, Nonny de la Peña, a journalist and former Newsweek correspondent, wanted to cover hunger in Los Angeles. But she didn't want to just write about the issue or create a video.
"What if I could present you a story that you remember with your entire body and not just with your mind?" she asked the audience at the TED Women conference Thursday in Monterey, Calif.
De la Peña turned to virtual reality. A colleague of hers had captured audio of a woman working at a food bank line who became overwhelmed with the number of people in need. "There's too many people," she shouts. Then a diabetic man in line collapses from low blood sugar and starts to have a seizure. De la Peña recreated the visual in a virtual reality scene that lets viewers look around and feel like they're there themselves.
At the time, "doing journalism and virtual reality together was considered a worse-than-half-baked idea, and I had no funding," she said. "Believe me, I had a lot of colleagues laughing at me."
But the film, "Hunger in Los Angeles," premiered at the Sundance film festival in 2012. When people removed their goggles after watching it, they were often in tears.
De la Peña is now called the "godmother" of virtual reality, and her quest is no longer quixotic. The goal of her company, Emblematic Group, is to "inspire people to care," she said. And the subjects she has turned her journalist's eye to are ones where caring can become a call to action.
Viewers can be transported into the center of a sudden street bombing in Syria. They find themselves on one side of a barred fence watching border patrol agents beating Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas to death on the other. Or they watch George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin move through a Florida neighborhood on a dark, rainy evening.
When viewers feel that they are in the scene, it grabs them in a way other media don't. At TED Women, I strapped on an Oculus Rift headset and watched Emblematic Group's newest story, "Kiya," which is a recreation of two sisters' attempt to stop their third sister's ex-boyfriend from killing her. You're in the living room as the argument begins to escalate. When the ex-boyfriend lifts his gun for the first time, my whole body shuddered and I tried to reach out to help.
"Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that when you're in a piece you forget that you're here," de la Peña said. "But it turns out you can feel like you're two places at once. ... I think that's what allows me to tap into these feelings of empathy."
De la Peña realizes that the power of virtual reality requires a deep responsibility to present the most accurate scenes possible. She and her team lean heavily on primary sources like audio from 911 calls and architectural plans.
"I have to be very cautious about creating these pieces," she said. "I have to really follow best journalistic practices, to make sure these stories are built with integrity. If we don't capture this material ourselves, we have to be very exacting."
"You can see that the basic tenets of journalism, they don't really change here," she added. "What is different is the sense of being on scene or watching a guy collapsing of hunger, seeing a man being beaten through the bars."
