Conceptualising Immersive Journalism

Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429581236
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents the history of virtual reality and its introduction into journalism, exploring the challenges posed by pushing to make the experience of news a full body event. The problem of interpretation versus objectivity is discussed, as well as the associated ethical responsibilities.

Immersive journalism offers the vicarious reliving of a news event with the full body through virtual reality technologies. As virtual reality devices become more accessible, major news organizations such as the New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNN, and many more are starting to experiment with this new form of journalism. This book discusses theoretical issues significant to immersive journalism's goal of using virtual reality to transport audiences into a news site. These include ethical issues concerning image manipulation and the place of the audience's body in the presentation of a news event. To approach these issues, the book presents foundational concepts of VR technologies that have helped establish the achievability of being virtually present in a simulated reality, as well as current research about immersive media's manipulative potential. Using a case-based analysis of how immersive journalism clashes or coincides with the goals of journalism in democratic societies, the book examines the possibilities and ethics of such experiences in journalism and news.

Original and intellectually provocative, Conceptualizing Immersive Journalism is an important study of this emerging field for students, scholars and researchers in the areas of Journalism and Media Studies.

1 Precedents of immersive journalism, between the fatal bullet and the reflective space

“But what is reality?” Asked the gnomelike man. He gestured at the tall banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park, with their countless windows glowing like the cave fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. “All is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine.”

(Weinbaum 1935)

This chapter maps out the development of immersive media and traces the impulses of their introduction to journalism. The chapter begins with the early history of immersive technologies then moves to more recent approaches that combine disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, communication and human computer interaction. The goal is to identify the general undercurrents that have marked the conceptual and technical development of immersive media, albeit without intending to present a comprehensive history, since detailed historical overviews are available in a number of excellent publications (Mazuryk and Gervautz 1996; Rheingold 1991; Burdea and Coiffet 2003; Stone 1991; Blascovich and Bailenson 2011). The purpose of this chapter is primarily to show that immersive media have a long history and have provoked as many dystopian visions as they have stimulated utopian ones. Less technically inclined readers could jump directly to the next chapter, which presents immersive journalism. However, I consider the terminology and concepts presented through the historical overview as essential knowledge for journalists wishing to work with immersive media.

A science-fiction fantasy

The first traces of the idea of virtual reality are found in science-fiction literature from the early twentieth century. Stanley Weinbaum is credited with being the father of the idea of what could be called VR goggles, which he described in 1935 in the short story Pygmalion’s Spectacles. This short fiction story narrates Dan’s journey to Paracosma, the “Land-beyond-the-world,” a narrative universe created by Professor Albert Ludwig to be experienced with all the senses through glasses filled with a liquid in an electrolysis reaction.

Several dystopian themes about a virtual world are presented in the story. A first theme concerns the nature of “the real.” At several points in the story, Dan and various fictional characters engage in a discussion about which world is real, Dan’s or Paracosma. The boundaries between which world is fiction and which is reality are constantly blurred. For the characters in the virtual world, Dan is a shadow – it is he who lives in an unruly world that does not follow the laws of nature. When exiting the experience, and exhausted after five hours of immersion, Dan is left perplexed, wondering if he has been in a dream, or if what he experienced was real.

The second dystopian theme resonates with current worries around immersive media and the idea that when we can stop perceiving the difference between the real and the imagined world, we may have a strong desire to remain in the virtual world forever. At one point in the narrative, Dan does not want to leave Paracosma – the imagined world is a more exciting place to inhabit.

A final theme present in Weinbaum’s story is related to the fact that Paracosma is controlled by very strict rules, which connects to current warnings about the rise of artificial intelligence as an ever more powerful force, and also with the simulation’s fictional character’s rights to consciousness and autonomy. At the beginning of this journey through the virtual world, Dan meets Galatea, a fictional character from Paracosma who is unaware of her own status as an author’s creation. Galatea is an innocent being who has never heard about death, pain, or cities. She lives in a predetermined world ruled by strict laws, a programmed world without beginning and end, and a world where reality behaves very differently from Dan’s world. The story describes some of Galatea’s questions and desires regarding her freedom to escape this rules-based world. In relation to the “rise of the machines” theme and the fear of living in a world controlled by artificial intelligence, in Weinbaum’s story the omniscient God is nonetheless still human – it is Professor Ludwig who determines the faith of all the characters in the world, even when these characters seem to have acquired a conscience of their own.

Weinbaum’s 1930s imaginings are in many ways formative for what will later become known themes around virtual reality:

• The fear of losing contact with the real world and/or preferring the virtual world.
• The fear of being controlled by computers.
• The question of what kind of world can be reached through virtuality.
• The question of whether what happens in the virtual space can be considered “real.”

In Weinbaum’s story, concerns with the moral challenges of access to such parallel realities were strong. As we will see later in the book, similar moral concerns are still very much present in the ongoing discussions about immersive journalism.

The first practical attempts at creating a “virtual reality”

Weinbaum’s story remained a fantasy for the next 30 years, until the 1950s, when Morton Heilig explored creating such a storytelling device (Heilig 1962). Heilig’s device, the Sensorama, was a single-person multisensory display system where viewers could watch a motion picture in stereoscopic 3D and stereo sound, feel the wind blowing from a fan and sense smells triggered by odour emitters while moving in a motorised chair (Stanney and Zyda 2002). This was a passive form of virtual experience, as viewers could only watch the film reels created by Heilig without having any possibilities for interaction.

Ivan Sutherland was the first to conduct systematic scientific work on interaction with computer-driven immersive media. During his time at the U.S. military, Sutherland had heard about experiments with remote monitoring (Sutherland and Sproull 1996). In one experiment, a camera was placed in a rooftop to observe a game of catch ball while an observer at the laboratory assumed the camera perspective and controlled the camera while moving his head. The experience of immersion (the subject’s actual level of sensorimotor stimulation experienced in a virtual environment) was so real for the observer that he tried to avoid a ball when one of the players threw it at the camera. Seeing this level of immersion, Sutherland wondered if it would be possible to immerse a person, not only in a real distant location through a camera, but in a completely synthetic reality generated by a computer.

In 1965, Sutherland hinted at the dark side of immersive media in his seminal essay “The Ultimate Display” (Sutherland 1965). At the beginning of the essay, Sutherland wrote about how digital computer displays could help us understand physical forces that we so far had been unable to comprehend (e.g. forces in non-uniform fields), in a kind of computer mediated “mathematical wonderland.” For Sutherland, if the computer was going to help us understand hard to grasp mathematical concepts, it should engage all our senses. Sutherland imagined a kinaesthetic display engaging our full body. This display could help us to do previously impossible things, such as seeing through matter and feeling the motion of negative mass. There was no reason why a computer-driven reality had to follow the natural laws of physics that we were most familiar with. Towards the end of the essay, Sutherland described the idea of

a room within which a computer would control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal.

While this description sounded strikingly like our real physical reality, the disquieting twist was the inclusion of an omniscient artificial intelligence entity, a computer God, which would have no qualms about creating a fatal bullet.

After moving to Harvard, and in collaboration with his student Bob Sproull, Sutherland began investigating various setups for head-mounted displays (HMDs). Sutherland and his collaborators had to solve many computational challenges regarding how to calculate the location of the head, as well as how to compute and display the right position of the geometry in the display. The HMD provided a kind of Augmented Reality (AR) experience, given that the user could see both the computer image and the physical location. Sutherland and his students were interested primarily in the computational and hardware problem of creating an immersive display. Thus, while opening our perceptual system to otherwise inaccessible experiences, the computer-driven mathematical wonderland Sutherland worked on was still missing consideration of a variety of human dimensions beyond location and degrees of freedom, insofar as it was an ethically ambivalent, emotionless reality.

Summarising some of the provisional answers about the potential uses of immersive media provided by Sutherland’s work, one could say that he proposed the following:

• Immersive media could help us better understand abstract realities.
• Immersive media worlds need not follow conventional laws of physics.
• Computers could control our virtual reality, to the extent of controlling real tangible matter.

Significant to note is that in Sutherland’s work, ethical questions were not problematised at this stage; the goal was mainly technical.

Around the same time that Sutherland was working on HMDs, Myron Krueger began experimenting with a different type of immersion, based on video projection in a room. Krueger’s 1969 VIDEOPLACE was an exploration of how computer-driven interactivity could be an artform (Loeffler and Anderson 1994). For Krueger, telecommunication was a way of creating a new place made of information that was simultaneously accessible to all participants, and through this concept, he wanted to create other forms of interacting with a computer that went beyond the mouse and keyboard. VIDEOPLACE consisted of a large screen projection where participants could see the silhouettes of their full bodies. Amongst the interactions a participant could have in this space was playing with a Critter, a computer-­generated graphic that could follow the participant. The goal was to create the illusion that the participant was playing with a kind of computerised mascot. Other interactions could happen between several simultaneous users, for instance hearing a sound when two silhouettes touched. Krueger wanted to invite people to forget their normal bodies and thereby start doing unexpected new movements. He saw a future for computing where DataGloves and goggles were a thing of the past, replaced by sophisticated sensors that could track a person’s body language, underlying anatomy, hair and skin colour and clothing, to register the entire person’s movements as well as behaviour, so that the person could be transported to a new virtual space with the highest fidelity. Krueger was also interested in including other senses such as smell, as well as using the idea of phantom limbs to recreate the sensation of touch in the virtual space (much of Krueger’s vision has now materialised and is even accessible to consumers through devices such as the Microsoft Kinect).

From Krueger’s work, we can highlight the following points:

• Immersive media could be built around natural interaction in social environments, it need not be a lonely individual activity.
• Interacting with immersive media could open new ways of being together, new kinds of social interaction (e.g. altering how we communicate with each other, in ways similar to what we now see with mobile media).

The early pioneers of immersive media were thus interested in pushing the boundaries of the “real” in order to question moral norms (Weinbaum), going beyond the constraints of conventional understandings of physical reality (Sutherland) and finding new forms of social interaction (Krueger).

Utopia and dystopia

While technical developments continued, the coupling of popular media impulses and technological development would increase public awareness about the potential of immersive media. In 1974, a h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Precedents of immersive journalism, between the fatal bullet and the reflective space
• 2 Enter immersive journalism: Removing the frame, engaging the body
• 3 The empathy machine vs. the objectivity norm
• 4 The ethics of immersive journalism
• Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index