As you play the new virtual reality video game Blindfold, a grim prison interrogation room wraps around you in full-scale, 360-degree dread. Somewhere off in the distance, a prisoner screams.
It’s the early 1980s, and you’re a captured photojournalist in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, being interrogated for providing pictures to Western news outlets.
Confess and you may be spared. Antagonize your tormentor, modeled after one of Evin’s actual interrogators, and he may turn to the battered companion who gave you up and execute him on the spot.
Stop this game, I want to get off!
Debuting Wednesday in the U.S., the brief, 12-minute Blindfold is one of a new breed of immersive, sometimes terrifying experiences that bend the rules of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to tell serious stories. In much the same way that game designers for years have used flat-screen media to teach about history, science, politics, culture and current events, VR storytellers are now finding ways to use the power of immersion for nothing less than understanding, empathy and social change.
“We were very invested in this idea of journalism and journalists and the price that they pay, particularly in hostile governments who are not supportive of free press,” said Vassiliki Khonsari, a Greek-American filmmaker and one of Blindfold’s developers.
Ink Stories, the New York media startup that she runs with her husband, the Iranian-Canadian game designer Navid Khonsari, also created the critically acclaimed video game 1979 Revolution, about the Iranian Revolution. She calls Blindfold a “sister piece” to 1979.
After Blindfold’s U.S. debut, Ink Stories will give it away to anyone with an Oculus Rift or similar VR gaming rig. “It’s something we want audiences to experience and we believe in the value of it,” Khonsari said. “We want to reach as many audiences as we can.”
Blindfold, along with nine other experiences — including a short VR film exploring aSyrian 12-year-old’s life in the Za’atari Camp in Jordan — will be on display in New York on Wednesday for the first-ever VR for Change Summit, a one-day event that is part of the larger Games for Change (G4C) Festival, which began Monday. The festival turns 14 this year.
That G4C is embracing VR was perhaps inevitable — for years it has hosted VR experiments, said Susanna Pollack, the festival’s president. “For me it felt like a natural extension of what we’ve been doing.”
But just as significantly, she said, over the past few years many VR developers have been “going beyond games,” experimenting with the best uses for VR. Game designers, filmmakers, journalists, artists and researchers have all pushed the field forward in unexpected ways, she and others said.
“A lot of the really exciting stuff is when parts of those communities come together,” said Erik Martin, who is curating Wednesday’s summit.
The event actually grew out of work the White House did last summer while Barack Obama was still president and Martin was a policy adviser in the Office of Science and Technology.
Obama had appeared in a well-received National Geographic VR film and got interested in using the technology for social impact. That led Martin to work with the U.S. Department of Education and Luminary Labs, a consulting firm, to create an “EdSim Challenge” that encouraged developers to create VR and AR tools for career and technical education.
Now a senior education program manager at Unity, the gaming platform, Martin said the power of VR is that it “forces you to pay attention to the thing in front of you, or that you are literally inside of.”
He noted another piece on display Wednesday, Across the Line, by “immersive journalism” pioneer Nonny de la Peña. Commissioned by the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America, it puts viewers in the role of a woman facing down protesters at an abortion clinic.
Though it’s not on display this week, Out of Exile: Daniel’s Story, uses real audio of a gay teen coming out to his family, who verbally and physically attack him. De la Peña’s Emblematic Group worked with Daniel Ashley Pierce, who’d captured the audio on his phone, to create a virtual version of the confrontation.
Martin, 23, who came out to his family at 18, said Out of Exile was powerful. Coming out, he said, “really is a thing that feels like jumping off the edge of a cliff — that’s very hard to convey to other people unless they experience that cliff-drop feeling, even a little bit.”
Out of Exile | Emblematic
In many ways, VR is the perfect medium to help people understand another’s experience, said Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
Much of what gives VR its power is its ability to create “presence,” the feeling that you’re in a scene and that it’s reacting to you in real time. If a scene moves naturally, smoothly and seamlessly as your head and body move, the simulation essentially fools your brain into believing that you’re in a real experience, not a simulated one.
The effect can be unexpectedly powerful. In Clouds Over Sidra, the VR film about a Syrian 12-year-old’s life in the Jordanian refugee camp, the act of sitting in on a simple family meal, in a spare temporary shelter, is almost unbearably moving.
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Source: USA Today