From the dense New York City streets to the deserts of sub-Saharan Africa, we might be on the cusp of something big. Someday soon we may just have access to the world in our hands and I’m not talking about the Internet.
Out of the blue, on Oct. 20, The New York Times announced a collaboration for a new project with Google: virtual reality film.
The Times launched its first VR-related application, called NYT VR, a mobile app that, according to The Times, “simulates richly immersive scenes from around the globe,” using virtual reality. To utilize the VR aspect to its full potential, The Times presented “The Displaced,” a collection of stories depicting dislocated children as the result of war, conflict and famine in several locations across the world.
According to Forbes, NYT VR “gives an exploded view of the possibilities of storytelling” as the medium heightens the sense of empathy for characters in the presented narratives.
“Like any video game, you find yourself dropped into a situation already in motion,” said Forbes reporter Patrick Hanlon. “This time, you’re standing in the middle of refugees in South Sudan as a plane roars overhead.”
Hanlon describes this sensation as taking your smartphone or iPad and moving the camera in a 360 degree-esque fashion to see the plane “above” your head or taking a gander at the environment around you, simulating the realism of the story to the viewer.
To follow the new app, print subscribers to The Times will also receive a Google Cardboard viewing device. Decked out with nothing more than The Times logo and a hole to place your smartphone, this apparatus is an attempt by Google to help bring virtual reality into the mainstream and it’s working. So far, over one million of these devices have been handed out to subscribers of The Times and the app is now available for download.
Although the concept has been around for decades, virtual reality seems to be inevitable. The Oculus Rift, for instance, is the first practical virtual reality device that features an array of attributes to immerse the user into a computer-simulated world via head-mounted display. Funded via Kickstarter and primarily a device for video games, the Oculus Company believes the device “will change the way you think about gaming forever.” It comes out early next year.
We also have the Samsung Gear VR, only compatible with Samsung smartphones and LucidCam, a virtual reality camera that captures images in a full 360 degrees. Both are relatively cheap. On the more expensive side, we have Microsoft’s HoloLens, with a whopping $3,000 price tag. It offers high-tech holographic imagery to accompany the user’s gaming and Internet browsing needs.
If given the chance, virtual reality has the potential to become something great. Breaking barriers and having a new emphasis on storytelling, the viewer has the potential to be effectively omniscient as they experience a different kind of “reality” from their own. VR can also change how we interact with media, and could be most prominent technological advancement since the creation of the Internet, if it catches on.
