Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept and discusses the implications of immersive journalism, which is the production of news in a form in which people can gain firstperson experiences of the events or situation described in news stories. The fundamental idea of immersive journalism is to allow the participant, typically represented as a digital avatar, to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story. The sense of presence obtained through an immersive system (whether a Cave or head-tracked head-mounted displays [HMD] and online virtual worlds, such as video games and online virtual worlds) affords the participant unprecedented access to the sights and sounds, and possibly feelings and emotions, that accompany the news. This paper surveys current approaches to immersive journalism and the theoretical background supporting claims regarding avatar experience in immersive systems. We also provide a specific demonstration: giving participants the experience of being in an interrogation room in an offshore prison. By both describing current approaches and demonstrating an immersive journalism experience, we open a new avenue for research into how presence can be utilized in the field of news and nonfiction.

FIJI: A Framework for the Immersion-Journalism Intersection

“…Her first Second Life journalism piece was Gone Gitmo, a virtual recreation of the Guantanamo Bay prison incident, in which the user is represented by an avatar that is unexpectedly detained and imprisoned in a cage in Camp X-Ray (de la Peña et al, 2010). The Second Life experience also confronted the audience with documentary footage from the US Department of Defense of the real-life detainees.…”

“…Her next Second Life work was Cap and Trade, which explored the cap-and-trade markets by having users first select the aspect of their lives that they intended to change to offset their annual carbon emissions: their cars, a transcontinental plane flight, or heating their house for a year. The audience would then be presented with "virtual replicas of actual projects where humanrights consequences, financial waste, and questionable practices provide a glimpse behind an opaque system" (de la Peña et al, 2010). Users' avatars were also followed by a personal carbon cloud to emphasize their individual responsibilities in the greater pollution problem.…”

“…The New York Times now has a news channel, The Daily 360, to highlight its immersive journalism production. However, in addition to immersing the audience in the visuals of the news story's location, de la Peña et al (2010) contended that it is even more important that the audience member's "actual body has transformed, becoming a central part of the news story itself. " To accomplish this, they tracked the head rotations of the user and then applied those same rotations to the head of a virtual avatar resembling a Guantanamo Bay detainee, which could be seen from both a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective, thanks to a virtual mirror.…”

Going Beyond the Classic News Narrative Convention: The Background to and Challenges of Immersion in Journalism

“…The type of scenario that Professor John V. Pavlik imagined is only possible through a sensory perception of space, such as the deep immersive journalism concept of the work lead by De la Peña et al (2010). The subjects have the sensation that their body occupies a space created by digital technology and that they can move around the stage created by a computer.…”

A Critical Axiology for Big Data Studies

“…News organizations will change even further as they experiment with the possibilities of "immersive" and "robotic" journalism (Carlson, 2015;de la Peña et al, 2010). Meanwhile, the marketing of news and the way news organizations think about their business are also changing.…”