A pioneering photojournalist hopes VR can restore war photography’s dramatic power to influence and inform us.
Sun streams through a grid of skylights, carving the gallery’s wooden floor into a checkerboard. When I look up, I can see wispy clouds passing overhead. Large photos hang on the gallery walls. They’re pictures of a landscape devastated by war and portraits of men fighting in those wars.
I hear footsteps behind me. I turn around and watch two figures enter the room and take up stations in front of the portraits. They’re the men from the pictures.
An unseen narrator explains that the shorter one, Jean de Dieu, was a child soldier recruited by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). It’s a Hutu group waging war against Rwanda from its base in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The other, Patient, is a sergeant in the Congolese army, which is allied with Rwanda’s ruling Tutsi ethnic group.
I know they’re both virtual characters, re-created through 3-D scanning and computer graphics. But they’re startlingly realistic—far more lifelike than anything I’ve seen in a game or movie.
As I approach Jean de Dieu, who looks sad and tired, a conversation begins. The narrator asks: Who is your enemy? What is violence for you? What makes your enemy inhuman? Jean answers in halting, vulnerable tones. I listen to his story of being forced into a refugee camp at age 11 and seeing Congolese militia kill his parents, their brains splattering onto him. Of course he’d hate the Tutsi, and everyone aligned with them.
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Jean de Dieu (left) fled Rwanda as a child and watched as militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo killed his parents. Patient (right) fights for the Congolese Army.
Now the narrator quizzes Patient. He says the army pursues the FDLR because its soldiers rob, rape, and murder Congolese citizens. “He has no human values and can no longer change his mind,” Patient says of his despised FDLR enemy. “He wants to stay in the forest as part of the rebellion like a savage. Only beasts live in the forest.”
But Patient and Jean de Dieu also tell the narrator something else: they just want to live in peace with their neighbors and families. And as I walk through three more rooms and meet more combatants—gang members in El Salvador, a reservist in Israel and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza—I hear that shared hope flicker through in answer after answer. These men all have different stories, different traumas, and different allegiances. But their dreams are the same. Abu Khaled, in Gaza, says 23 of his family members have died during the Israeli occupation, but he still hopes for “peace and brotherhood” in the region.
After 40 minutes, I’m guided to a spot on the floor that resembles a Star Trek transporter pad. An assistant helps me remove my Oculus Rift VR headset and backpack, and I’m back on the ground floor of the MIT Museum, where this ambitious virtual-reality exhibit, “The Enemy,” made its North American premiere in the fall of 2017.
The exhibit—or maybe “experience” is a better word—is the creation of the Belgian-Tunisian photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa. He interviewed and filmed the fighters and then worked with Fox Harrell, a professor of digital media and artificial intelligence at MIT, and French partners Camera Lucida, France Télévisions Nouvelles Ecritures, and Emissive to bring them to life inside the virtual gallery.
Part of what’s groundbreaking about “The Enemy” is the sheer size of the simulation: the museum cleared out a 3,000-square-foot space so that up to 15 Oculus-wearing visitors at a time could roam freely in the virtual world. The fidelity of the characters and their movements is also striking. You can see the stubble on their chins and the tattoos on their arms and torsos. Thanks to eye-tracking sensors, each figure’s gaze is locked onto yours, cementing the illusion that the fighters are speaking directly to you. The technology works well enough to disappear, allowing you to form direct, empathetic connections with Jean, Patient, Abu, and their fellow combatants.
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This photograph of Jean de Dieu is one of those used to create his avatar.
Which is exactly what Ben Khelifa wanted. “My interest was, can you look at these people in the eyes?” he told me. “Can they look you in the eyes? And what is happening when two people look at one another in the eyes? There is a connection, whether we want it or not.”
Right now, the “The Enemy” is accessible only to museum visitors, but Ben Khelifa says he wants those trapped in conflict zones, especially young people, to experience it too. If the installation can help people see that every conflict is grounded, to some extent, in stereotypes and misunderstandings, they might come to understand one another better and stop fighting, he believes. It’s a noble goal—but will all future VR producers have such benevolent aims?
Blown away
The idea that VR might be a medium for a new kind of journalism took hold around 2015, when the New York Times released its first VR documentary, “The Displaced,” about three young war refugees. Technically, the pieces produced by the Times’ VR studio are 360° films. Viewers can look in different directions, but otherwise, they watch passively. Sticklers reserve the term “virtual reality” for simulated 3-D environments in which users can move around at will and control objects, as gamers can on platforms such as HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and Oculus Rift. That’s the type of virtual reality that Ben Khelifa, a freelancer who has covered conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Israel, Yemen, Somalia, and many other countries, wanted to employ for “The Enemy.”
Ben Khelifa says he was worried that traditional war images have lost their power. Take the famous photo of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old refugee boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015. “Every single parent in the world should react to this and say, ‘That could be my kid,’” Ben Khelifa says. But though the image saddened millions, it didn’t move nations to intervene in Syria. “We don’t have the same emotional relation with photos that we used to have,” he says.
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Source: MIT Technology Review