Virtual reality (VR) offers publishers a new way to engage with audiences, where viewers are immersed into a situation and encouraged to empathise with the characters and the issues they are watching.
However, Catherine Allen, freelance VR producer for the BBC, explained that journalists must be aware of the ethical issues surrounding the production of this type of content.
“With virtual reality, rather than telling a story, you are putting someone inside a story – and usually involving them in it,” she said at the VR & AR World conference in London yesterday (19 October).
“The user is the most vulnerable in comparison with any other screen-based medium.”
Many VR projects developed by publishers so far have covered sensitive issues: the Guardian’s first VR project, 6×9, let viewers experience solitary confinement, Within’s Clouds Over Sidra followed the life of a 12 year-old refugee, and the BBC’s Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel took viewers back to the streets of Dublin to witness the 1916 rising that saw the attempted rebellion against British rule in the midst of World War One.
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Source: Journalism UK