THE CHANNEL
|
ISSUE 2 2015
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55
n September 2014,
immersiv.ly commissioned
the film-maker Edward
Miller to create a news
documentary about the pro-
democracy demonstrations
in Hong Kong. We wanted
to produce a documentary that put
viewers at the heart of a live news
event of global importance, one
that gave a sense of "being there",
using the latest developments in
360-degree video.
In capturing material for
Hong
Kong Unrest
, Edward Miller formed
a one-man video and audio
operation. He mounted six
lightweight GoPro cameras on a
cuboid block, to capture a 360-
degree view of the demonstrations,
and used a sound boom to lift his
lightweight camera rig above the
crowds. He captured a dramatic
story as protesters and police tried
to face each other down on the
streets of the Admiralty and Mong
Kok districts of Hong Kong. The
media-savvy protesters used
dramatic imagery (the mass
opening of umbrellas) and
standard songs with global appeal
("Happy Birthday" and "You’ll
Never Walk Alone") as symbols of
protest. When tempers frayed,
police used pepper spray to push
back the crowds. It was an action-
packed story, but it was not until
the post-production stage – the
process of stitching together the six
video streams to form a “globe” of
video that can be viewed "from
inside" by a viewer wearing virtual
reality goggles – that Edward
discovered the full range and detail
of the action he had captured: the
incidental, telling details that had
unfurled behind his front-facing
view of the action, the every-day
events (people going in and out of
shops, getting on or off buses) and
the dramatic (a woman falling over
in a scuffle with police).
INTERACTIVE LAYER
And there lies the power, and the
challenge, of covering news in
virtual reality. The viewer is at the
heart of the action and, crucially,
has a choice in how he or she views
that action. In a 360-degree video
the choice is of where to look in a
combination of six basic planes
(front, back, up, down, left of right)
and when. In a computer-
generated space, the user has the
same freedom of movement as in
computer gaming – and options to
play additional content (voice over,
video, and motion graphics).
It is that interactive layer that
makes VR a revolutionary news
platform. It hands to the viewer the
final choice – as news editor or
director, as a non-passive explorer
of events – previously reserved to
the news provider. Immersiv.ly
London-based
immersiv.ly was set
up to make news
content in virtual
reality, with the aim
of re-creating trust
in news across all
age groups. This
trust has been eroded
by generations of
seeping exaggeration
and fear-mongering
in news coverage,
says immersiv.ly’s
Founder and CEo
Louis Jebb. Here he
explains that
whatever form of
virtual environment
journalists work in –
360-degree video,
computer-generated
graphics, or a
mixture of the two –
the mission is to
make people care
about news
THE POWER OF
VR
I
t
