VIRTUAL REALITY

Empathetic Media creates stories that immerse you in unexplored worlds with otherwise unattainable perspectives. VR uses computer-generated three-dimensional imagery at room-scale to create interactive environments that can be explored using stereoscopic head mounted displays (HMDs).

We are a one-stop shop for researching, producing and delivering publishable VR and 360 video experiences to a wide range of platforms. We have extensive experience shooting 360 video from Bangladesh to Colombia (with the US in the middle) that is easily published to Facebook and Youtube. Distribution channels include Oculus, Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear, HTC Vive and native mobile applications.

There are two aspects to this work. The first is a room-scale VR experience for the Vive that recreates the interior of a “casa de la memoria” (memory house) from Granada, Colombia using photo and videogrammetry. These memory houses are community spaces for collective mourning for those who died during the five decades of the Colombian conflict. Volumetric guides escort the user around the space, presenting different aspects of the conflict to them, along with personal objects, photos, scrapbooks and souvenirs that users can pick up and interact with. There are also beacons within the museum that, when the user approaches, materialize other witnesses to the conflict as 3D scans with their original audio, who also paint a more complex picture of one of the world’s longest-running conflicts in the year that the peace accord was finally implemented. The second is over a dozen 360 videos featuring survivor testimonies recorded all over Colombia, each of whom accompany us as they guide us through the spaces that their memories of the conflict are associated with.

Produced with the support of the Images and Voices of Hope NGO, the Fledgling Fund and the Open Society Foundation. Part of an exhibition at Colombia’s Centre for Historical Memory in September 2017 and the Medellin Book Fair 2017.

An interactive experience that explores the fatal shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 by Officer Darren Wilson using a combination of graphic journalism, audio, photographs and virtual reality. It allows you to move through an immersive recreation of the incident in Ferguson, Missouri and view the events based on multiple, contradictory eyewitness accounts.

The aim of this piece is to compare and contrast the eyewitness reports and allow you to see how this single incident has given rise to such a wide range of perspectives. First published in 2015 by Fusion for the Oculus DK2 and then later released on mobile for iOS and Android. Read more on the Fusion page here.

In 1967, the photographer Gordon Parks, shot “A Harlem Family” for Life magazine. This series of photographs would form some of his most significant images, set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. 50 years later, little has changed.

Looking beyond the outcomes of conflict, police shootings and social stereotyping, this project will address the context for violence, introducing a viewer to a world of monotony, limited opportunity, and social stigma,mapping the spaces with a combination of 3D scans, Parks’ original photos, and 360 video.

Produced in partnership with Magnum photographer Harriet Dedman and the Gordon Parks foundation using Matterport’s state of the art 3D scanner. Exhibited at The Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, NYC from Feb-April 2018.

For more on the project, visit the website here.