By Robin Ewing

Nonny de la Peña screened her immersive journalism project, called Project Syria, at Sundance Film Festival last month. Users wear a virtual-reality headset to experience a street bomb in 3D, the visuals meticulously recreated from a video of a real mortar strike in Allepo, Syria. Headphones deliver audio from the actual bomb. Then you head off to a Syrian refugee camp, recreated from videos and interviews with residents.

Here’s a video from Peña explaining how Project Syria works (apparently it’s not uncommon to cry during the experience), and here’s a video that shows you, in less impressive 2D, what the visuals look like.

Project Syria was one of 11 VR exhibitions at this year’s Sundance’s New Frontier event, ranging from a Hollywood marketing film to a bird-in-flight simulator, where you become the bird, lying on your front, a fan blowing the wind through your feathers as you fly.

Lots of people are saying that VR is the future of journalism, but experiences like Project Syria — which uses custom-made VR goggles with a wireless motion tracking system — require technology most of us don’t have. That’s where the buzzword Oculus Rift comes in.

Last summer, Facebook bought the company Oculus VR, which is developing the VR headset called Oculus Rift. At the moment, you can only buy a developer’s kit for US$350, as no regular set is yet available, but most are guessing sometime in 2015.

Still, despite the lack of a commercial headset, the highly anticipated mainstreaming of VR through Oculus Rift has got news media already creating Oculus Rift content. For example, last month, American newspaper-publishing giant Gannett Company Inc. published an Oculus Rift VR ski experience, in which you get to ski downhill. Fast. And Earlier in September, Gannett’s Iowa newspaper the Des Moines Register published an Oculus Rift news game called Harvest of Change, that tells the story of the changes affecting Iowa’s farmers.

If you happen to have a headset, you can download the Harvest of Change VR version. Otherwise, regular people can use the Unity plugin (Unity gaming software is what Nintendo Wii uses) for what is described as a “light” version. But if you prefer the old-fashioned multimedia version, there’s that too.

The company Alchemy VR has even gotten Sir David Attenborough to make VR nature documentaries, taking users into the Cambrian ocean 550 million years ago. And the Tow Center for Digital Journalism is working with Secret Location (a company that works on contract to create stuff -here’s their Sleepy Hollow VR project) and PBS Frontline to make a virtual reality journalism project on Ebola, to be launched in spring.

As I write this, companies are racing to develop Oculus Rift rivals, including Microsoft’s augmented-reality device HoloLens, Sony’s VR Project Morpheus and the secretive augmented-reality device Magic Leap. The company Virtuix  has created a platform, harness and special tracking shoes that allow you to move around while wearing Oculus Rift goggles.  And Peña, who coined the phrase “immersive journalism,”  recently put on a motion-capture suit and VR goggles in her lab and “drove” a robot 6,000 miles away to physically interact with people at a university in Barcelona.

But in the meantime while we wait, Google has come up with a DIY way to experience VR called Google Cardboard, a homemade holder you slot your Android phone into (of course, there is an iphone hack), a modern take on Mattel’s 1960’s toy the 3D View-Master. And LG has come up with its own plastic version.

And App developers are already creating VR content designed specifically for Google Cardboard. For example, Vice News also premiered at Sundance this year its first VR newscast on the New York December protests against police brutality. The 360-degree, 3D film is available through the VR app VRSE — co-founded by Chris Milk, who directed the Vice VR film — and can be used with Google Cardboard.

Peña — whose latest VR creation, Use of Force, is based on mobile-phone videos of a Mexican migrant beaten and tasered to death by US border patrol agents — says VR creates empathy and sees these types of immersive experiences as the future of journalism. And Dan Kaplan has even called Oculus Rift an “empathy machine.” Though it’s hard to imagine strapping on ski-goggle-sized VR headsets every time we want to experience the news, predictions are the technology will quickly streamline and get less expensive. Or we could just hang it from our trucker hats. 

Journalism educator Dan Pachecoes sees 3D scanning technology (check out the way Matterport and Structure are doing 3D models with mobile technology) expanding into VR journalism as well as a whole new world for advertisers to do direct marketing and product placement. While news doesn’t really need another opportunity for the blurring of lines between advertisement and editorial, it could offset high production costs. Gannett said Harvest of Change took three months and nearly US$50,000 to make.

The Guardian has predicted some creepy ways augmented and virtual reality could change the way we live. And research has also shown that even just a few minutes of VR can affect our behavior in real life.

But as for journalism, “I don’t know if it will change the way people think about the news, but it will definitely change the way they receive their news. Just as with the introduction of radio or television, these new news delivery systems changed our feelings about the world we live in,” Peña said in an interview with Beckett Mufson.  “I believe VR will fundamentally change the landscape of how we experience many stories.”