The Drax Files Radio Hour – Immersive Journalism

Last week’s Drax Files Radio Hour has been put on the back burner because of the news of Linden Lab’s proposed new virtual world and SL11B. This is a bit of a shame because not only does Drax have a fantastic interview about immersive journalism with Nonny de la Pena, but the interview also touches upon some of the pros and cons of Second Life. This is actually extremely relevant when you consider the news about Linden Lab’s new virtual world.

Nonny de la Pena is a journalist and documentary maker who moved from traditional media such as Newsweek to creating immersive spaces in virtual and digital environments to tell news stories, amongst other things. The subject matter is often controversial and political, for example in association with Peggy Weil she built Virtual Guantanamo in Second Life. I’ll embed a 2007 youTube video by Draxtor Despres about that at the end of the post.

Nonny  speaks about how the idea was to bring an experience such as virtual Guantanamo to a virtual world environment such as Second Life to bring the news and issues to a more immersive environment. The idea being that this was a different means of raising awareness about such issues. Actually it’s probably better if I quote Nonny’s website about section in part :

The fundamental idea of immersive journalism is to allow the participant to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story. The participant will be typically represented in the form of a digital avatar – an animated 3D digital representation of the participant, and see the world from the first-person perspective of that avatar.

This is further expanded upon :

Immersive journalism is a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. Visual and audio primary source material from the physical world reinforce the concept that participants are experiencing a nonfiction story, with the video, sounds or photographs acting on the narrative.

There’s a far more in depth explanation in the link above but the basic idea is to tell a news story in a different environment. Nonny felt that one of the advantages of Second Life was being able to talk and collaborate with people all over the world in a virtual environment as well as being able to bring the news story to people all over the world too. Nonny also feels that in some ways Second Life was ahead of its time.

However there was a downside and that’s in relation to an old bugbear of mine. Virtual Guantanamo is no longer in Second Life and one of the main reasons for that is because …. The Tier Is Too Damn High! I’m not making this up. The expense of land in Second Life stifles development of projects such as this. However Nonny wasn’t put off from using virtual worlds by this and moved on to Unity to build immersive journalism and in doing so highlighted another issue regarding Second Life. Via Unity people can enter the immersive environment without downloading a client, they can enter via the web. This has long been considered a weakness of Second Life, although personally I don’t think it’s a major one, it is an issue that means that people who just want to casually pop in to view something are thwarted somewhat.

Nonny comes across as being a huge fan of virtual reality, she talks of the Oculus Rift and virtual reality goggles, of how people can become extremely immersed in the immersive journalism to such a great extent and how this will continue to develop. What really comes across is Nonny’s enthusiasm for these concepts, this is one of the most enthusiastic use cases i’ve heard about virtual reality, this goes far beyond games and first person shooters and Nonny points out that she is also working on fiction for these environments, again showing the breadth of the virtual reality experience.

There’s a lot more in Drax’s post, lots of background information and related pieces. This is a really good interview and covers far more than I can here. This is also a holiday edition so it’s around 45 minutes instead of the usual 60, but it really is a fascinating 45 minutes, really good stuff.

The issues of tier and the costs of land in Second Life are extremely important with the news of the new Linden Lab virtual world gathering pace. Whereas Second Life has many positives, the simple fact of the matter is that the current tier model makes storytelling in forms of both fact and fiction difficult. Lower land fees would greatly increase the possibility of more people creating immersive and interactive fiction and non-fiction.

Now I’ll leave you with that old Drax video, he really did need to lose that beard!

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