Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters

by Mandy Rose

When the Oculus Rift Developer kit was launched in 2013, few people anticipated that nonfiction would rapidly become a prime theme within VR production — so that by 2015 VR projects were being commissioned by organizations including the BBC, the New York Times and the UN, and extravagant claims were being made by producer Chris Milk for VR as “the ultimate empathy machine.” As a researcher looking at emerging documentary practices, this was a field that called for investigation. I started talking to fellow researchers Ki Cater from the University of Bristol and Danae Stanton Fraser from the University of Bath about what a project interrogating VR nonfiction might look like.

Bringing together discourses from documentary and journalism, development processes from filmmaking and video games, and a platform that had already been widely studied for its potential in educational, military and clinical contexts, we were convinced that this emerging medium needed an interdisciplinary research approach. So, we began to consider how we might combine Ki’s expertise in computer science, Danae’s research in psychology, and my own perspective in documentary studies. In 2016 the UK’s Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council announced a funding call for projects concerned with content creation in the digital economy. After submitting a successful Expression of Interest, we went to the second round, and, in 2017, the project was selected from a shortlist of over a hundred projects.

So, thirty years after the term virtual reality was coined, and nearly fifty years since Ivan Sutherland’s first experiments with a “head mounted three dimensional display,” we embarked on Virtual Realities: Immersive Documentary Encounters, to explore the application of VR to nonfiction.

We began with the hypothesis that the spatial environment of VR might have significant potential for nonfiction, but that immersive environments would also give rise to new challenges for documentary. Our primary research question is broad — asking how the affordances of VR for immersion and interaction might take forward documentary’s mission for storytelling about our shared world. To answer that question we are looking at what spatial storytelling within virtual environments contributes to the work of documentary for witnessing “the real.” How might the feeling of being there, known as “presence,” contribute to a knowledge of and engagement with the people and situations reflected within virtual environments? How do different VR platforms and their associated sociality and isolation mediate VR documentary experiences?

We are also interested in the production process — and are looking at the challenges of designing a shared grammar of VR experiences involving real-life subject matter with an interdisciplinary mix of stakeholders. Additionally, we are probing the ethical implications of virtual encounters with images of real people and places. Finally, we are asking: What business models are emerging to support VR documentary production?

The research is unfolding through a number of work packages that address our research questions from a number of directions. We’ve been mapping all the English language nonfiction VR created between 2012 and 2018 in an online interactive form to reveal the extent of this sector, as well as themes, technology platforms and storytelling approaches. Meanwhile, we’ve been undertaking a number of empirical studies — looking at audience responses to VR nonfiction — both in the lab and “in the wild.”

At the same time, we’ve commissioned three path-finding VR pieces. In Waiting Room: VR, Victoria Mapplebeck has taken her experience of breast cancer treatment as a theme through which to explore how she might translate her first-person documentary approach into 360 video. In Love & Seawater, Lisa Harewood and Ewan Cass- Kavanagh investigate what VR might contribute to the Barrel Stories project — a multi-faceted exploration of the legacy of family separation within economic migration to the UK from the Caribbean. In Transplant, Oscar Raby and Katy Morrison return to the Pinochet regime in Chile — the historical terrain of Oscar’s first VR work, Assent, to develop the formal question at the heart of that piece: how story can be conveyed through interaction. Through a series of in-depth interviews, we’re examining these three commissions as case studies. Finally, we’ll be looking at the economy of VR nonfiction through a production study of ten companies.

✍︎Filming “The Waiting Room” at the London Radiotherapy Centre — Guys Hospital

A number of partnerships underpin the research. Among them we are working with BBC R&D. Maxine Glancy from that team has been at the heart of the project, contributing a creative industries perspective. Other partners — the Guardian VR team, for instance — have joined us in a series of workshops through which we’re in dialogue about the research with a wider group of academics and makers. Our third workshop, Changing Minds — on the Ethics of VR Nonfiction — will take place at the BBC in November.

We now have a huge amount of data to analyse and some remaining research still to undertake, but we have lots to share and we’re keen to disseminate our work. Over the coming months we’ll be sharing our work in a series of articles for Immerse, as well as taking papers to academic conferences and publishing in journals. In the first article, published in this issue of Immerse, Dr. Harry Farmer describes our research into the power of nonfiction VR to change attitudes and reduce prejudice. In later issues, we will also be presenting pieces on our research into audience responses to nonfiction VR “in the wild” and our work in cataloguing and analysing the trends in nonfiction VR production over the past 5 years.

The intention of the research is to offer critical support to the development of this production sector, while keeping the interests of the audience and the documentary subjects to the fore. We hope these articles will contribute to that project.

This article is part of Virtual Realities, an Immerse series by researchers on the UK EPSRC funded Virtual Realities; Immersive Documentary Encounters project. This project is employing an interdisciplinary approach to examining the production and user experience of nonfiction virtual reality content. The project team is led by Professor Ki Cater (University of Bristol), Professor Danaë Stanton Fraser (University of Bath) and Professor Mandy Rose (University of the West of England) with researchers Dr. Chris Bevan, Dr. Harry Farmer and Dr David Green and administrative support from Jo Gildersleve. For more information see http://vrdocumentaryencounters.co.uk.

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