Virtual Reality goes beyond Entertainment and is a field that anybody with creativity can be part of. That’s right, you don’t necessarily need an extensive background in the Entertainment industry to make a beautiful VR piece. But you do need to be a good storyteller and open to big challenges. Producing Virtual Reality and being part of the VR post production is a job for dedicated and driven people who are willing to dive into this new world and unveil the best ways to approach people in the most efficient and powerful ways.
However, there must be a reason to use Virtual Reality as a way to tell a story; and the biggest reason for that is being able to convey a message strong enough to become an experience for the viewer. Forget about details and close-ups as a way to compel people. The best advantage of VR is to take viewers to places where they wouldn’t have the opportunity to go under certain circumstances; it is to take them into other people’s worlds and make them feel how these characters feel through this experience. It is to show them a reality that they’re not used to; it is to show them how it feels to be in Aleppo or inside a building in Italy that just got destroyed by an earthquake.
Forget about the last documentary you watched about a catastrophic hurricane in Haiti, because you will actually be there – in less than 48 hours after the actual incident occurred. You will not only see all the destruction of a natural disaster, but will also live for a moment besides children that have no perspective of life at the moment because they just lost everything they had. Virtual Reality can be a very powerful tool if you really let yourself be immersed and touched by the context of the story you’re being told.
Virtual Reality is also a powerful tool used to treat pain and health issues such as PTSD, dementia, and Parkinson disease. And this is absolutely amazing. But the way of reaching the highest number of people and making this medium a way of delivering a compelling and relevant message is through Journalism. Telling stories is one of the mankind oldest practices, but with technology being developed in such fast pace, people need ways of being told stories that really touch and make them feel part of it. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are the perfect ways of communicating the reality to people that are far beyond these scenarios.
Imagine having your kids learning the human system or the history of the United States by being immersed in these experiences and interacting with it. There is no doubt that it is easier to learn through experience than through traditional methods and in no time we all will be talking to people from elsewhere through holograms as if they were right in front of us. Technology’s future is now and we must be open to these new experiences.