Hi, Frank. How are you doing? Excellent. Thank you very much for the introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here. I, despite sounding like an extra from Dalton Abbey, we are based in Brooklyn. We do create, as you may have just heard, VR and AR and graphic journalism, basically using different modes of storytelling to showcase some of the stories that you guys tell in new ways and try and foster new modes of interaction between audiences and storytellers. So what I hope to do today is talk you through some of our process, how I got to this point, as well as try and debunk and demystify some of the jargon and some of the technicalities around VR. There’s a lot of people that assume it you need a Hollywood budget or it’s way too inaccessible for you to use. So my goal is that you will really step up your game after this and think about ways you can incorporate it into your stories. So it might help before I even begin that, though, to ask you guys, what do you think, well, how many people think they understand the term restorative reality? Okay, great. Because if you open your hands up, then I could just leave. So restorative reality, in a lot of ways, it runs counter to the traditional journalism axiom of if it bleeds, it leads. It’s the idea of using restorative narratives to foster a sense of community, bring communities together, inspire hope and reveal a personal angle in the universal. So really what I’m trying to do, it’s not just showcase the tech, which is fantastic, by the way, but also to look at how at a fundamental level, story, it really can help story and serve story. So what you can see is a screenshot of our latest project, I Survived, it’s around the Colombian conflict. What I, as I mentioned, I’m going to start at the very beginning and then lead all the way back up to I Survived and you’ll be able to try it out as you heard at the Volta Cafe this evening. So hold on, forgive me. Great. Such as my technical expertise, I’ve immediately gone the wrong way on the slideshow. So as you can see here, what we try and do at Empathetic is really break down the barriers between demographics. A lot of people are assuming, oh, you do VR, you do tech, it must be for millennials and much younger news consumers. We don’t believe that. We are fundamentally passionate about bringing accessibility to this sort of form of storytelling. So we use things like Google Cardboard. You don’t have to use, for example, the Oculus. How many of you, I’m going to make it a little bit more interactive. How many of you have used the Oculus Rift? One person? Okay, great. It’s a little more, Mark Zuckerberg would breathe a little easier after his investment. So, yeah, we’ve used the Oculus. We have used Google Cardboard. And for us, we’re not tied to one specific form. We just want to, as I mentioned, serve the story as best we can. And a lot of the ways when I first got into this as a graphic journalist, it was in stark opposition to a lot of the messaging and a lot of the visuals that I saw NGOs were leaning on in order to get their stories and their messages across. So, rather than bound by quite a limited budget, people were resorting to quite dramatic and often negative messaging, such as this. And by these, I don’t mean to, I’m certainly not pointing out, what I’m hoping is that this will foster a sense of conversation around these sort of messages rather than point to, well, don’t do this, which is in itself inherently negative, ironically. But it was messages like this that I saw when I was tackling the theme of human trafficking that really got me thinking about, actually, what is the message that’s coming across here? It really fundamentally highlights the sense of victimhood. It is inherently focused on a danger aspect in terms of people that might be in that situation. I’m not sure whether it would really lead them to come forward. And for me, obviously, you can see it blanks out their identity. Coming in the UK, we saw a lot of advertising, and it typically falls into this sort of cliched pattern of objectifying a lot of the women that are involved in these trafficking situations, whilst at the same time, those of you that have worked in the trafficking space will know that it is definitely not by any means just women that are involved in human trafficking. So typically, it can become quite limiting and quite a constraint to go down such a sort of a cliched route. So instead, I, in 2009, started a project with a Fulbright fellow, Olga Trusova, called Borderland. And essentially what we did is we took the stories of human trafficking survivors in Ukraine and we turned them into comics. So one thing about graphic journalism, and this sort of builds on what Molly Krabapple said yesterday, is that it’s really about representing the voices of the people who you are framing and who you’re sort of honored to tell their stories, but doing it with as little avail between you and them as possible. So I’m not really injecting myself in the story. As you can see here, the words in the text balloons, those are direct quotes. And in a lot of ways, I feel that graphic journalism can actually become much more candid and transparent a means of representing news, simply because it’s very conspicuous that you can see I have drawn this situation. And in a lot of ways, this is a criticism that was leveled at Ferguson as well. It’s all about the methodology that you can provide as well. So I’m certainly not saying there is one way into a particular story. One beauty of using such a visually leading storytelling approach is that it’s very malleable. So in terms of the assets that we created, Borderland actually became a traveling exhibition. This is it in one of the largest parks in Kiev. It’s translated into Russian, Ukrainian, as well as English and actually printed out by the IOM, the International Organization for Migration, and distributed to at-risk schools around the region. So it’s not just a simple, you know, it’s not just one delivery form. You can have comics, you can have printed matter, you can have a web deployed version. This next piece focuses much more on that live sketch aspect. For me, this harks back to the idea of restorative narrative in the sense of I do this while I’m literally interviewing my subjects. So it gives them a sense to be part of the production and the reporting process. At any moment, they can turn around and say, well, hold on, how do I look? And often I’m doing this with a crowd of people around me, often they’re friends telling them that they look fat or ugly, which is great. But you can see I’m still applying the same sort of rubric. So it’s their direct quotes, sort of metastasize in speech balloons around them. And you can see that particularly in situations like human trafficking, there are instances where you wouldn’t want to bring recording equipment or video cameras with you. So you can see at the bottom, that’s actually the scar. This man based out of Cavry Palanchok, which is just east of Kathmandu, Nepal, he actually was tricked into selling his kidney. So again, it can really foster that sense of empathy and connection between you and your subject when they can see what you’re doing and how they’re going to be represented. It’s not something you shoot and then take away and they never have access to. Then I take these stories and I work them up into more finished artwork. And then that’s often distributed as an NGO, by NGOs as sort of printed matter and online. So I was pleased to see that the Trafficking in Persons report put out by the State Department sort of welcomed this as an innovative approach. And there you can see overwhelmed by enthusiasm as he looks at his portrait. So while I was in Nepal, I was also very happy to work with the BBC. Again one issue that, and we’ve seen this come up in previous presentations, is the idea of visuals becoming more viral and shareable online. So that is a, comics in a lot of way can distill a lot of information into a very accessible format. So here, again it was a first person centric story of, this was Lakshmi, again from Kavre, telling the story in a very first person direct form rather than someone else telling her story for her. I’ve applied the same sort of format when I was working on more recent stories, such as in Baltimore. I went to Baltimore in the wake of the Freddie Gray death. And really in a lot of ways that sketchbook, much like Molly, allows me access to these parts that ordinarily, you know, it can create a bridge between me and the local communities there. And they can really, I want to give them that platform, that ability to be represented and say what they want to say in a unique way that they can then share. So this guy posted it on his Instagram, was very happy again to see his likeness sketched. In a lot of ways it sort of harkens back to that old court tradition where, you know, only royalty, et cetera, would have their portraits taken. While I was in Baltimore, I actually started work on a different sort of project and I’m just going to walk you through, like I mentioned, different sort of forms of storytelling. So augmented reality. How many of you have tried augmented reality? Okay, great. So the way augmented reality works, this is a screenshot from our latest, this is our app, ARC. It’ll be out next month on the Play and App Store. And essentially what it, the way it works is on the far left you can see a menu screen, or you can browse through a number of different stories with our partners. On the middle screen is a tutorial page showing you how it works. So you effectively hold your mobile phone up and it uses your camera with a trigger that’s either printed or digital to bring up models like you can see in the third iPhone there. Other phones are available. To browse through the content. So there’s audio and text context and maps as well. These are some screenshots of upcoming projects. Ironically with the announcement recently about Donald Trump and his taxes, we have got a piece coming out with the Associated Press looking at the Trump Empire, how much of it he actually owns, how much of it is actually worth, how much of it is licensed, and how much of it is hot air. And then that Freddie Gray story that I mentioned, this ties into what I’m describing about Ferguson, but inherently I find that a lot of space can become quite a pivotal issue when you’re trying to understand story. And in particular something like the Freddie Gray case, the young man who died in police custody, the question is what does that space inside a police van look like and how large is it compared to his relative size? So that’s really what you can represent in this, what is essentially a 3D infographic. But in terms of virtual reality, I also want to draw a line between this lovely device here. What that device is. Okay. Great. So for those of you that don’t, and I’m pointing to this rather than seeking out anyone in the front row, sorry about that. So that is a GoPro rig. And essentially it’s a 360 video rig comprised of six different GoPro cameras, all recording simultaneously. Then what you do is you basically you take the feed out, you stitch it together, and it can be published on YouTube as well as deployed to different devices so that it gives you a full 360 field of vision. One important difference between what that is and what we do is that we create computer generated virtual reality. So in that sense, we create the environments as you can see here, just by the light, recreating environments so that users have full range of motion. They can actually move inside the space, otherwise because in 360 film you’re actually anchored to the spot like the camera. And they can interact with objects. And we fundamentally believe that there’s that sense of interaction and immersion that creates that sense of empathy with the characters and the person whose perspective you’re taking on in that story. So I’m going to give you a little walkthrough through Ferguson. By way of introduction, my access to Ferguson came about because I was a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow at the University of Missouri, and I arrived 10 days before Michael Brown was fatally shot. So I, yeah, a lot of my friends actually, rather sardonically, he insisted that there was some sort of global conspiracy everywhere that I went suddenly, two hours away, became the center of the news universe, which was odd. But I’m going to, so what you’re about to see is a reconstruction of the Canfield Green apartment scene where Michael Brown was shot and the first sort of minute or so of the virtual reality experience. With a little more sound, maybe. So okay, if you can’t hear that, maybe just the two people in the front can hear it. You’re inside the experience. This is a first person view. The white beacons represent pieces of evidence. I also drew out some of the testimonies that you can see based on the grand jury transcripts, and all the shell casings and the pieces of evidence were released publicly through FOIA requests. So essentially what I did is I reconstructed the story. I’m going to visit it in the fixed order displayed. The black and white beacons can be visited at any time. All of the geographic locations are based on research and data gathered at the scene, though in some cases, witness beacons have been approximated. I was going out, I was working, and I walked outside. I see two young guys walking on the street on the same sidewalk, and my initial thought was, wow, that’s a big dude. Because Mr. Brown, Mike Brown, he’s a big guy. He’s tall and like stocky, but not sick. They both walked past me. OK, in the interest of the giant ticking timer in front of me, I’m going to move forward, but please come to the Volta Cafe and check it out for yourselves. The fundamental mission or belief behind it is the idea that there is no one single totalizing truth, and as you’ll see when you experience it, the whole way about the story is that each eyewitness is saying something in a lot of ways that is inherently contradictory to the one next to them. So it’s up to the user to have the agency to piece together what they think actually transpired. So we’re giving you the power to make sense of the story, and in that way, it’s that sense of restorative inclusion in a storyline. It’s not just passive. It’s not just, here’s what we want you to take away. Here are the bullet points. It’s a much more immersive experience. In terms of designing the mechanism behind that, we also looked at different ways, because some people might not have that time, so we are flexible with this technology, and it is very much in its infancy. As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s by no means this sort of silver bullet for perfect immersion and storytelling. I’m actually just about to start a fellowship at the Tau Center at Columbia University looking at links, research links, empirical research links between VR and empathy. So it’s still very, like I said, very embryonic. But essentially what you can do here is once you have that 3D world built, you can then make new builds and reprise the same content in different formats to make different experiences. So in a lot of ways, it’s not often that you get to use a test stories and then rebuild them according to, say, unconscious biases that users might or might not have. We could take someone, for example, that was inherently, say, staunchly pro-police and more conservative and give them a deliberately opposite experience and see whether that engenders a stronger sense of empathy. So I’m just going to briefly touch on our latest project, I Survived. This is around the Colombian conflict. It’s been going on for 60 years. It’s not the easiest thing to distill down into a sort of elegant 15 or 10 minute virtual reality experience. So that’s where empathetic media’s trans-media approach, I think, comes in. We’re applying a contextual graphic novel to giving people the history behind the story and the events. But the real fulcrum of it lies in a restorative justice system that is being pioneered outside of Medellin, one of the two largest cities in Colombia. And effectively what they do is they’re taking paramilitaries, guerrillas, and civilians who are all on opposing sides, and obviously the civilians were caught in the crossfire, and sitting them down in classrooms and encouraging them to forgive each other and explain the reasons why they got involved in the conflict and how they wound up in that path and heal, essentially. So we wanted to do something that wasn’t about narcos, cocaine, violence, the standard sort of mantra that you hear when often you need sort of a, like I say, the story in a nutshell. We wanted a more nuanced approach. So that’s why we took those testimonies and we recreated them using CG. Some of the means that we use to do that are 3D scanning. So again, that’s still very early days, but it is much more accessible than you think. We’re working with a company called Matterport that effectively takes a connect scanner. How many of you have heard of Microsoft Connect? Any of you? Any gamers? OK. So it basically takes three of those and it spins around. I’m doing them a horrible disservice here, but, and it turns the environment into 3D assets that you can then move around in that space alongside. And in terms of how you can incorporate characters into that environment, you can now have the technology to, you can get devices that bolt onto your iPad. Again, other brands are available. And scan your characters in. And then have them appear inside the story. So that’s what you’re seeing in the top right hand corner there. In terms of what the environment looks like, this is what the classroom that I just mentioned looks like compared to in real life. And as I said, the real goal here is to create these experiences and put them on mobile devices like Google Cardboard and like the Samsung GVR and translate them into Spanish. Although obviously the original interviews were done in Spanish and take them back to these communities and use them as tools for creating awareness and outreach. So it’s not just something where you can, you go to the location, you take these stories and then it’s only a sort of a more niche audience here in the West that will get the chance to experience it. I’m very interested in how they will respond to it and how in a lot of ways they can be the curators of their voices in that sense. So I’m just going to wrap up by showing you some of these different screenshots inside the experience. Again, it’s that sense of first person. In a lot of ways, one of the definitions of virtual reality is an interactive or a digital environment that changes in response to the user’s actions. And so I see the parallels between that and in counseling what’s referred to as active listening, that sense of reiterating back what you’re hearing from someone. And so I think that, again, that builds on that dialogic principle where it’s not just a one-way stream. It’s that idea of taking stories and seeing how people respond to them inside an environment. So again, this is inside the guerrilla camp. So I’ll just finish by showing you this is actually what happens when you look down. So it’s that idea of embodiment. I appreciate, you know, in journalistic circles there also might be people getting their heckles up about where you can’t appropriate other people, you know, the use of avatars in terms of representation and modes of representation. But I feel like provided there is that methodology that I mentioned with Ferguson and provided there is that sense of transparency and that the subjects of the story, their voices are paramount and their concerns and their the truth behind what they are their path into the story is represented. I feel like we can all get a more immersive restorative approach and really, to me, foster that sense of empathy that I built the company on. Thank you very much.