 Hi everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the RightsCon panel on creating virtual reality for public good. My name is Jason Kelly. I apologize for kind of a froggy throat today. I woke up like this a few days ago. I am getting better but luckily we have a great set of panelists who will be mostly taking the lead as they're the experts on first reality and how to use it in the public good. So again my name is Jason. I'm going to introduce everyone quickly. My role at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a digital strategist. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an online civil liberties and a non-profit to make sure that when you go online your rights go with you. And I work on the activism team and kind of help educate and also work on legislation and other various campaigns to make sure that our goals actually get implemented in the real world. So I'm going to quickly read through the folks that are on here just so you have a sense of their bios and then I'll try to do as little talking as possible so you don't have to deal with my ridiculous voice here. But we've got a really great set of panelists starting in alphabetical order with Kathy Bisbee who is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist who produces traditional and immersive social documentaries in the public interest and also organizes communities around media, art history, community action and culture. Kathy's the executive director of the Brookline Interactive Group, BIG and the founder of the Public VR Lab which is mostly why she's here today. She's the lead creative designer and producer of a project called Arrival VR which is a kind of national immigration and migration storytelling experience in VR. She's also co-produced eight additional Community XR projects and since 2018 Kathy has been also a research fellow at the MIT Open Dock Lab and her field work was recently featured in Ms. Magazine talking about the critical importance of building an inclusive accessible grassroots movement for Community XR in the public interest. Kathy received the next legacy prize from the Virtual World Society and was featured on Ken Bae's Voices of VR podcast in 2019 and this year joined the Cyber XR Coalition where she works on standards for XR privacy and digital rights. So I might have thrown out some terms there that you aren't all familiar with like XR, we'll get into that a little bit more. But continuing on, Rebecca Bow is a communications strategist at Earth Justice which is a non-profit environmental law organization as well as a freelance journalist and along with a drone pilot and videographer, she created Too Wild to Drill which is a 360 VR film experience that brings viewers directly to the threatened coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This virtual reality experience helps viewers understand that defending the Arctic isn't just about protecting wildlife, it's also crucial upholding the rights of Indigenous people and diverting the worst consequences of global climate change. Continuing on, Courtney Ratch is the advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent non-profit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the rights of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal. She's the author of Cyber Activism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt, Digital Dissidents and Political Change. She and the Committee to Protect Journalists help to provide information and fact check the virtual reality game blindfold which places you in the perspective of a photojournalist enduring a harsh interrogation for spreading anti-state propaganda. The game in which you're forced to deny or confess to crimes by remaining still or shaking your head was inspired by real life accounts from Evan Prison in Iran. And joining me also, my colleague from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is Artemis Shotskin. She's a, excuse me, front-end web developer at EFF and along with numerous EFF websites and projects, Artemis built EFF's first first virtual reality program, Spot the Surveillance, which is a VR experience that teaches people how to identify the various spying technologies police may deploy in communities. So with that out of the way, thank you for bearing with me. I'm going to go ahead and just get started with the folks, with asking questions of folks. And I'm going to start with Kathy Bisbee who again is the co-founder of the VR Lab, the public VR Latin. I'd like to ask everyone to talk about their VR projects and their experience in VR and why they chose it as a format. But Kathy who's worked on many VR projects will have, I think, a little bit more scope to answer that question. So I wanted to start with her. How did the VR, a public VR lab get started and what were some of the first projects that you worked on, Kathy, if you don't mind telling us? How many times have I had to unmute myself in the last five months? So I'm in the executive director of Brookline Interactive Group and we're actually part of the community media movement around the country. It's a long time movement since the 80s. We've been around for 35 years in fact and our goal has since our inception been how do we put technology and media tools and training programs in the hands of everyone. So our goal is really to make sure that the public has access to the media and we're one of 1,200 I think media centers around the country and there's also we have colleagues in Europe as well. Our funding is currently under threat. If you go to publicvrlab.com you can read more about that challenge that we're really facing both for our work as a community media arts organization in the public interest but also on behalf of the public VR lab and the work that we're trying to do to make sure that those same tools that we've made available in traditional media have now become available and will continue to become available in immersive media as well. So for me I'm a storyteller. I'm a documentary filmmaker and I was a community organizer for 13 years. I worked for the Pergs in five states, the public interest research groups and so I was always looking for how do I craft a story that's going to be visible in mass media. I was always thinking about that since I was young and so when I started to see Google Cardboard I saw people making them themselves. I don't know how long ago that was but five or six years ago, six years ago. I really was intrigued but I wasn't that interested because I'm not a gamer. I'm not a video gamer person and I didn't see the connection at first and then in 2015 I was at the Future of Storytelling conference in New York City which is an amazing conference. And I saw a piece that Gaby did about, I'm forgetting his last name, the UN piece on Syria. Not Nani, the Le Penya's piece but Gaby that worked for the United Nations piece. And I was inside of an HTC Vive and I felt it this early. I had an experience where I took the headset off and I was in tears. And for me as a storyteller I saw immediately the power of VR to be this immersive experience, this visceral experience, this opportunity to simulate the possibility, not exactly the same but the possibility of what it would be like to feel something that someone else would feel or what their experience was or for people to go places they've never been before. And since I'm from a town of 400 people in western Maine most of the inhabitants have never left the town that I'm from. I know that firsthand. I know what it's like to be able to see parts of the world and to then want to protect it. So a friend of mine said, you know, if you don't know it you can't protect it. And I think that that's really for me kind of led me to making media in the immersive medium and helping others to do so. I mean really my goal is to train others and train the trainers so that we can deploy community XR across the globe. That's great. Thank you so much for that explanation. And actually I think it leads really well the point you made about if you can't know what you can't protect it to Rebecca who worked on the Earth Justice project too wild to drill. Could you talk a little bit about that and about your experience? Yeah sure thing. And yeah thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with everyone today. And thank you Kathy for sharing that. So you know for Earth Justice I produced a seven and a half minute VR experience about the threat of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Arctic Refuge, this is a really unique wilderness expanse in Alaska. It's home to endangered species, polar bears, different kinds of rare Arctic species. It's also a place where migratory birds from every continent in the world actually fly there and use it as a nesting ground. And in 2017 the Republican-led Congress passed a provision in the tax bill opening up the Arctic Refuge to oil and gas drilling for the first time in decades. So I really created this VR experience as part of a broader campaign to stop oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Earth Justice is an environmental law firm and we've been engaged in litigation to protect the Arctic for decades. So you know the purpose of my 360 VR experience was to really bring people to a place that they probably wouldn't have been able to travel to otherwise. It's extremely remote. You have to sort of charter your own private plane to get into the Arctic Refuge and it's very, very expensive to travel there. So I wanted to sort of bring viewers to a place that they likely would never be able to go that's very, very far away. I also wanted viewers to feel as if they had actually met the Indigenous people who are on the front lines of this fight, who are the Gwich'in people of Alaska and actually the Canadian Arctic as well. The porcupine caribou herd is a really important, you know, it's a caribou herd that migrates to the Arctic Refuge, uses the Arctic Refuge as a calving ground. The Gwich'in actually refer to the Arctic Refuge as the sacred place where life begins. And so for the VR experience, one of the first things that you do is go to the Gwich'in gathering, which is in the Canadian Arctic. And you meet with Gwich'in elders, you hear from Bernadette Dementiff, who is Executive Director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, you see a canoe race and a, you know, a dance. And so I just wanted people to sort of understand, you know, that community and that connection to the landscape and also travel, of course, to the Arctic Refuge, you know, where you can see like these braided rivers and just this gorgeous landscape. And then we also take them on an aerial tour of Prudhoe Bay, which is the industrialized oil zone, not too far away from the Arctic Refuge, which is sort of the epicenter of oil and gas industrialization in Alaska, so that you can really see that contrast between the beautiful, like, pristine Arctic Refuge landscape and Prudhoe Bay, which is just, you know, it's just like an oil camp. It's just pure oil and gas infrastructure. And one thing that was pretty cool about producing this film was that we relied a lot on drone footage. And so as you are in the experience, it's almost as if you're flying over these Arctic landscapes. I just tried to share my screen. I hopefully did that correctly so people can see just a still from that. Does that look right? Yes, that's Prudhoe Bay. And then I've got one more. I'll go back to Kathy's, a couple of the projects that you're working on, but I just wanted to quickly, so while people were talking about the actual experience, show some slides from them. So can you explain what's happening in this slide? Oh, sure. That is from the Gwich-In Gathering. That's a dance that's happening. The Gwich-In people have a lot of, you know, songs and dances and things that are directed toward the porcupine caribbean herd. And so this was a sort of a traditional event that we were able to capture. Cool. Okay. I just ended sharing and muted myself. And then I'll go back to that. But I just wanted to mention that, you know, there's this huge variety of types of VR. And your experience is a 360 video. Can you talk more about that and how VR works with that? Sure. Yeah. You know, I have very little experience to be honest with you in, you know, filmmaking or VR. But so I don't even really know that much about like AR or gaming or other, you know, uses for VR. But I, you know, I do think that, you know, as humans, we like story, we like to get lost in story. And, you know, I guess for me, having a 360 VR film experience just seems like a really good way for people to feel sort of fully immersed, you know, in a landscape and feel connected and sort of build a sense of empathy with the people who they were encountering. That's part of it. Great. Okay. Thank you so much. I'm going to move along so we can get everybody's kind of experiences on the screen and get everybody to talk about them. Courtney, could you talk a little bit about just what exactly the experience that, which is called blindfold that you worked on through the Committee to Protect Journalists, what it's supposed to do and kind of what your involvement in it was. And I'm also going to, while you're talking, I'll try to put it on the screen so people can see. Okay, great. Well, thanks so much. Yeah, so the production firm that was doing blindfold came to the Committee to Protect Journalists because they wanted to essentially recreate the experience of being a journalist in an Iranian prison and not just any Iranian prison, but really one of the most notorious in Iran and in the world. And they wanted it to be real and meaningful. And it is, it's also really, it can be very traumatic. So, you know, you want to know what you're getting into going into there, which is that you are going to be on the other side of the table from another Iranian journalist. And we were there to provide information about what journalists face when they're going through prison, the information, statistics about journalists who are imprisoned around the world because while this was focused on an Iranian prison, in fact, many of the tactics and the experience we would can only assume is indicative of what it's like in many parts of the world. And part of the reason that we wanted to do this with them is because we do a lot of advocacy on the cases of imprisoned journalists. And in fact, just over the weekend, we found out that one journalist that we've been working on behalf of for several years, as I'm done, Asgharov, died in prison, and we don't even know why, whether it was COVID or not. And it's, you know, I've been, I've been working on this case as long as I've been at CPJ, which is six and a half years. And it can be really hard to get people to care about these issues or to bring it out of just the numbers or a foreign name that doesn't resonate with anyone. And so, you know, we partnered on Blindfold because it was this idea that we could help people have a visceral experience of what these journalists are going through in prison and what it must be like. And it is really a difficult experience to have. But I think it's really important. And I know that for my work as the advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists and really leading our campaign strategies on behalf of imprisoned journalists, it felt like an important opportunity to do something new and innovative, which would also get our issue again into new venues. We took it to Gaines for Change, the Oslo Freedom Forum, Santa Fe Journalism Under Fire Conference, and being able to bring this visceral experience of a journalist in prison, and then allowing somebody to be that person on the other side of the table and making choices. It was just a really innovative approach to this and to connect these stories with the reality of what it must feel like to be forced with those choices. And we wanted to connect with people in a new way and tell a story in a new way. So that was really the impetus for doing it. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you for explaining all that. And I'm sorry to hear about that journalist. And at EFF, we do some work on a project we call Offline, which is around usually bloggers or coders, but sometimes journalists who have been silenced or in some cases harassed or abused or been killed outside of the country usually. And so I am a little bit aware of this situation. And this VR app is something that I think it really gets to that experience that people need to put themselves in someone else's shoes in a way that reading a blog post can't. But I just want to quickly bring up Artemis, who is my colleague and who I worked with, a little bit on the spot the surveillance tool. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, speaking of how VR can put people in other people's shoes, how spot the surveillance does that and kind of what you worked on there and what it's supposed to do. You're muted. Sure. So I had a conversation months ago. I don't even remember when with Rebecca where we talked about how in both our experiences, which are very different, what we're doing is making the invisible visible in very different ways. And in too wild to drill, you're taking people to a place that they can't see because it's so remote. And in spot the surveillance, there's technology that's right in front of people, but they don't know that it's there. So they can't see it. So spot the surveillance is an experience where people learn to identify police surveillance technology in the experience you're in a street corner in San Francisco, where a citizen is speaking to a couple of police officers. And you look around the scene and try to find what technologies are there and learn about them. The idea is that you would see these technologies and then you could identify them in real life in your own community. And we created this, I guess, in 2018. And as we all know, times have changed a little bit since then. And so the idea of being able to identify police technology in your community is actually much more vital now than I mean, it's always been vital, but it's much more crucial at the moment. So it's, I feel like, you know, that part of the experience has become more to the forefront. In creating this, you know, it's like I was the coder. So it's a very small project. And that's an interesting thing also about our panel here is that we have quite a range here of experiences from a very simple small project to a large field project, but also in terms of intensity. Spotless surveillance isn't actually like storytelling per se. It's more of an experience where you get information. So in that way, it's not extremely emotionally intense. And, you know, virtual reality has that ability to be, you know, something that's extremely emotional and draws people in. And that's a really good part of it. I was going to say something else. Oh, I wanted to just point out that we keep saying the term XR, but we haven't defined it for everyone. So I just want to say that XR is kind of a global term for augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality, which are all different types of new technologies that all have immersive qualities to them. Thank you for remembering to do that. And for having a definition, which is why you are on the panel. So you know what you're talking about. I'm just asking questions. Thank you. I want to share a few screenshots of the project that Kathy most recently worked on, I think, and then a different one as well while you just quickly talk a little bit about it. And then I want to kind of go through and see what people's feedback has been to some of these projects. And I'll just, after this, we'll just open it up and let people kind of say what, you know, what the experiences have been for folks and what they thought. And yeah, I'll be sharing my screen in just a second, but go ahead, Kathy, and explain. I'm going to start with, I'm sure I tell you the right one here, since Public VR Lab has done so much. I'm going to start with there's something in the air. Okay. I will say though, there's two things I wanted to comment on, if you don't mind. I don't know if you heard me earlier, I really struggle with this language that our industry uses, the VR industry uses around walking in someone else's shoes, because I think it's problematic. And so I want to just make things more inclusive by not, not continuing that, that language around VR, because we can never walk in someone else's shoes as, as I can't walk in somebody else's shoes that I haven't experienced their lives. So I want to be careful around that. I think it's better to say we can give people a feeling of what it might, might be like in Alaska or what it might be like. It's also not reality. It is a simulation of reality. And I like to think of XR as an umbrella term, but I have very heated Twitter debates with people in our industry about what we should call it, whether it should be called immersive, whether it should be called XR. So XR is kind of representative of the entire umbrella, but I don't know if we've solved that problem yet. So I'll just talk really quickly about this project. This was these three projects here were some of our first, first dish projects. We started the Public VR Lab in really 2015 doing research and then got our first HGC Vive in the spring of 2016 and also started learning A-Frame and working with folks in the community. Boston VR is a big partner of ours in Boston. We're a bookline. So we created a project called Hopes and Dreams in A-Frame that you, we filmed people individually in the community with a green screen and then just put them or white screen rather and then just put them inside of WebVR in a circle. And so you have the sensation of being in the middle of the circle listening to your community talk about what's important to them. And it was January of 2017 when we did that project. So people started talking about what was important to them. And there were some pretty intense things that people were talking about in our community. The second, one of the next projects that we did, I think it was our first paid project which was exciting. The town of Brookline actually supported this project. Thank you very much to do 360 video of all of the town monuments. And we also put that with the help of facility, both of these projects, put that into WebVR and we're able to provide that to the town. So people could not have to go to these monuments but could actually see them in the context of 360, which I think is really different than seeing a 2D or a flat environment. We did a big eco hackathon. I don't have a graphic for that but we did a big eco hackathon in April for Earth Day. As I was an environmental justice person for the first 12 years of my career, I kind of went back to that and I said, let's do an Earth Day hackathon. Boston VR co-sponsored it, helped support it. And we had about 150 really diverse participants sign up for it. And about 16s came up with final projects. And out of that conversation, out of that hackathon, the UN reached out to us and said, hey, we don't want to do it on climate change because this series theme is air pollution and water pollution. Can you guys make a VR experience on air pollution worldwide? And we said, no, we can't. We're a little nonprofit. But we know people in our industry that we've collaborated with. And so we collaborated with this organization. And we created a 3D globe and then took the data from the UN and populated it into every single country on the globe. This is all web VR, by the way. And so then created the little slider. You could actually slide it. The 1990, you could slide it all the way up till present day. And you could see over, I think, a 30-year period of time how air pollution had changed in each of these countries across the globe. So what was really cool about that is we went to Kenya, to Nairobi, to the United Nations Environmental Assembly, and we were able to show it to all of these worldwide leaders and help them understand how air pollution was rising or falling and see it in a really visceral way. And then the new project that you showed there for just a second is our Immigration Storytelling Immigration and Migration Storytelling Project. We are on a unity timeline showing pre-1620 American migration and immigration all the way through till 2020, which coincidentally is the 400-year anniversary of the Mayflower. And also a cultural reckoning. So the timing is good for us to be having conversations about what it meant to have already been here or to have arrived, how people arrived, where you come into the project, you say what your family came as far as you know, and then there's a little glowy orb that makes you feel like you're connected to this story because you're on the story on this timeline. And then you can see everybody else's story on that timeline as well. So we have had several iterations of that. We had, yep, so this is the most recent one. We have interns in South Africa and the United States all still working on it during COVID, trying to finish the project. But the goal from this is, and I think that next slide with the Statue of Liberty shows you kind of the project plan. I think this might be of most interest to people, which is that we're building a Community XR guidebook from this to help nonprofits understand how to use VR, how do you scale up for VR, how do you make decisions about what kinds of software and tools and training and building capacity inside of your organization. Do you have that slide, Jason? I saw it flash up for a second. It has a Statue of Liberty on it somewhere. I'll just talk for another minute if you can find it. So we'll have a tool book for nonprofits to use, very similar to what across the line that Planned Parenthood put out. They put out a really nice guidebook you can actually go to across the line. I gave Jason the link and I think they'll be up later. You can go to their website and you can download their sample action plan with postcards and with their guidebook. And that's similar to what we're doing with the idea of Community XR and using this Immigration Storytelling project as an opportunity to create Community Dialogue and to facilitate Community Dialogue about a topic as also a way to educate people on what VR is. I'm going to bring that up in one second. It wasn't in the right order and then my computer freaked out. One second I'll drop it in there. While I'm getting that up, could you talk a little bit about what the experiences people have had in response to these? You know what you mentioned about trying to show other people's experiences? Do people, especially in this most recent one with Arrival, have they commented about the kind of connection that you're creating? Absolutely. There's some really interesting things that come out. So when people take the headset off, it depends on where they are on the spectrum of having tried VR before, right? We spend a lot of time just being VR educators, frankly. But we also get things like, you know, in Africa, it was amazing. People actually believed what they saw. So it was a non-Western mindset around sort of the mysticism and the magic of VR, which I just loved. I thought it was beautiful that people would maybe when they took the headset off think that there was still water underneath them. I love that people can really be playful and engage and you see people. I've seen seniors, for example, chase after robot dogs and throw sticks at them and almost run into brick walls because they're so engaged physically. I've even seen seniors. We do a lot of work with seniors. I've seen seniors who have a physical limitation outside of VR. Inside of VR, they suddenly lose sense of themselves and are lost into the experience to the point that they lose some of their physical limitations. And caretakers have said to me that they've never seen anything like it. And there's a lot of amazing research being done around how much we can convince ourselves that something else is happening, right? So that's also power that we have to communicate. It's also power that can be misused. I think we need to really make sure that we're being ethical and that's why I'm part of the CyberXR Coalition. So back to these project goals. So VR education, participatory media. So we, when people step out of having watched this experience, we ask them to tell their family's story if they know it or what they know or if they don't know because that's a story too. It's also one of the goals is really to facilitate a depolarized dialogue in communities. COVID may change some of this, I don't know. And to really inspire other community creators to create community-based programs that are in the public interest. And also to learn how to operationalize that because I think it's really important that we figure out how to build our capacity. And it's tricky because things, the first year that VR cameras, 360 cameras came out, there were 27 cameras over three months period of time in 2016. So you try something, suddenly the company's gone in its vaporware that happened to us on a number of occasions. We did the inauguration in DC in an AR app in 2017 and the Women's March and the app disappeared. So even though we have inside of that app, 77 pieces of media content and stories that we told inside of augmented reality, which was super cool and historical importance, that's gone because of vaporware. So you do, it's a lot to navigate these different kinds of changes that are happening within VR. And that's why I gave you a number of the links because I thought they would be helpful from my perspective in the industry, what some of the current organizations and nonprofits and companies that are helping us create media really simply. That's super helpful. And especially the last kind of points you were making about the, it's also new. I know, I want to get people's thoughts about what experience they expected people to have and what feedback they got with their projects. But I also wonder if people experience any difficulties just given the technological kind of shifting that's happening. I know Artemis can speak a little bit to that. But if someone wants to talk, Courtney or Rebecca or Artemis a little bit about what people within your organization were hoping for and then what actually they've experienced in terms of feedback, that would be great. And I can call on someone. I'm happy to do that. Courtney, are you able to speak on that? Sure. So I think that we went into this with an open mind because it was an external, there was an external partner who came in who wanted to do this and they wanted to do it in a sensitive way and they wanted to do it accurately. And they wanted to do this experience also to raise awareness about the broader issue. So it felt like it was coming from the right place. I think it can be very challenging to partner on something like this, especially when it is a really traumatic experience that you're doing. And you want to be sensitive to that. I think that we were hoping, so we took it out to a couple of events where the company that produced it was there and we were there to talk to people about the experience and walk them through the broader issue. I think what we were hoping was that it would be a little bit more mobile, but one of the things we found was kind of the gap between what you could do as an exhibit, say at a space that's made for that type of experience versus something that people might download an experience or be able to take more on the road, which is I think what we were hoping to do was maybe do more with say college classes, university students who want to be engaged in this issue and that is a way that maybe to connect with a younger audience. I think there was a gap there just in part because of the technology. I think VR is still very new. I don't think most people have the headsets at home in order to use it. So that was a little bit challenging, but I think it was a great learning experience and it gave us a real idea about how you could use not only the virtual reality, but also this kind of choose your own adventure format, where the person then becomes very invested in the story. So it's not just it's not just you're in somebody's shoes and I think being in somebody's shoes is very different than occupying them as a person, but you're in somebody's shoes, but you're also having to make some choices and frankly realizing in some situations like the ones that we advocate in, there are no good choice sets, which is I think can be really hard to illustrate. So it was a good experience. I think we would do it again. I think it also helped us realize frankly that it's unlikely that we are going to do our own VR experience from scratch because there's so much. I mean, even just in this session, I've learned a lot. You know, there's so much to learn from and this is a whole field unto itself. So I would definitely say that if we were going to pursue more things like this that we'd want to do it in partnership, but I definitely think there's a huge potential both for that kind of experiential side, but also for learning. Like I would love to do something with the VR firm to help people learn what it takes to do journalism, for example, or what it's like to be a freelance journalist on the front lines and the choices you have to make about what you can afford based on how much that editor who commissioned an assignment paid you or you're still waiting for your check or, you know, there's all sorts of I think interesting things that can be done. And so it was definitely an exciting way to start exploring that. I particularly like that you would do it again, but that you recognize, I think we had this experience VFF that this field is just so expansive. And there are kind of part of this is that it's new and part of this is it's fast moving. And I do think part of it is just language barriers also, like you said, like, what is XR? What is VR? What like what is a frame? But there are a lot of resources that people can start with. I'm actually going to drop a few of them into the chat. Thanks to Kathy for putting those together. So people who are watching can, you know, scroll through some of those links and see some of the ways to get started. I'm going to jump over to Artemis really quick, since you were a coder on the spot the surveillance project. Both what did you see in terms of, you know, your experience with that? Was it difficult? How did it feel getting into it? And then also, you know, just in terms of the response people, how has what you expected become, you know, the reality from the results of the project? Or has it been different than you thought it would be? Yeah, thanks. Well, I did a lot of brainstorming before I ever even got started with a couple of colleagues about how to approach this. And we did want to have something that was as accessible as it could be in two meetings of the word. One is that we went with WebVR. So we could build an experience that people could view from their desktop if they didn't have a VR headset, or even from their phone. Obviously, the experience isn't going to be as immersive in those cases, but that we wanted to make it as accessible as possible in that way. And so we ended up using A-Frame and definitely had some support and conversations with Kathy about that, which is, you know, a framework built by Mozilla to create VR experiences that are viewed through the browser. So I feel like that was a really good choice. It's also open source, which goes along with, you know, EFF sensibilities. And we also thought about accessibility in terms of different people's different abilities. So in the experience, information is given to the user through sound and visuals. So if they're more reliant on one than the other, they can still get the information. And also that we decided not to use any hand controllers. So if that was a challenge for people, they didn't have to do that. Of course, that means that it has to be a pretty simple experience. But with all these assumptions, we did a lot of user testing within EFF. And then we did user testing outside EFF. And we were pretty happy, which once we launched it, that our assumptions proved pretty correct. And that there was a lot of ways to get to the experience and a lot of people could access the experience from wherever they were coming from. We also made a Spanish version. So the exact same experience in English and Spanish would be great if we could expand further. But that's as far as we got. So I would say that it's a reception in the world was good. And kind of what we were hoping for. I, as the only other person here who's probably spent a lot of time with spotless surveillance, I can just say demoing it at the Journalism 360 conference, I did. It's so fascinating to tell someone what they're going to experience in words. And then they put on the helmet or the headset or whatever. And everyone has always been surprised and pleased. I think that's a really interesting thing about VR right now is that you, you know, if you tell someone what a video game is going to be about, I think that they turn it on and they're like, yeah, that's what I kind of expected. But it seems very different with VR because it's still so new and it's also so different from what you're used to, even though in many ways it's kind of just sometimes it's just video and it just happens to be in 360 degrees. But that immersiveness seems really to take people by surprise, which I like a lot. And I wanted to talk quickly with Rebecca then about the kind of drone footage experience that you created and also just regular footage with Too Wild to Drill. Did you get the kind of feedback you wanted? I know when I've looked at it, it brings you to this, I just finished reading a book, Into Thin Air, the John Crackauer book about Disaster on Everest. And yeah, it's an amazing place, the Arctic in these areas in Alaska and these mountaintops in places where you couldn't normally visit. But do you feel like people get that experience now through this and was that kind of what you hoped? Yeah, it's so interesting because the way that we decided to share this VR experience was through these small group screenings in different environments. So we had six different Oculus Go headsets and we'd sort of bring people in and sit them down in swivel chairs so that they could go all the way around and see the full spectrum of the shot. And we did this at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, which is in Northern California. We also gave the Film Festival a couple of VR headsets so that they could take it on tour nationally. And we also went to the halls of Congress. So we took it to DC and we showed it to legislative staff and advocates who happened to attend this event. And we brought it also to a conference called the Tanana Chiefs Conference in Fairbanks, Alaska, which is attended by Alaska Native people, including Wichin people and tribal leaders from around the interior in Northern Alaska. So in each of these different settings, the feedback was really, really different, as you can imagine, you know, from Wild and Scenic Film Festival. A lot of times you'd get somebody who was maybe, you know, a college professor and said, can I use this as a tool in my classroom or people had already been educated about the Arctic and wanted to know what they could do to protect it. In DC, it was fascinating because people were well aware of it as a political issue. But for them, the visuals was what they didn't expect. You know, they were like, wow, I had no idea. Prudhoe Bay looks so, so very different, you know, from this Arctic refuge that you're trying to protect. And then of course, in Alaska, it was just a really, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the Wichin people have a very strong, they rely on the porcupine caribou herd as a primary food source. They have a strong cultural and spiritual connection to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge because that's the calving ground of the caribou herd. And so for them, you know, people would just, you know, they were seeing people they knew in the video at the Wichin gathering for one thing. And then afterwards, you know, it was just really emotional to like have the conversations with them that came up after the experience. So I would say it really kind of depends on your audience a lot, you know. I was going to quickly ask folks, looks like Kathy dropped off. But whoever's got thoughts about, let's see, the question from the audience was about kind of like the cost of creating these experiences. And if it would be difficult as like a high schooler or if someone isn't, you know, familiar with this, my own understanding, and then I'll let other people speak to this is that, you know, there's this huge spectrum, Artemis, you mentioned this. You can get a drone that does 360 video, or you could just get a 360 camera, and you could create a virtual reality experience without too much effort, you know, with some free tools. So I do know there are ways to build these with a little bit of ingenuity on the cheat. But what do other people think about, you know, is this an easy thing to break into? Does anyone want to speak to that? I can speak to it a little bit. I think easy depends on where you're coming from, you know, if you if you have some, I mean, I think what you're mentioning about 360 video, I think if you can get a 360 camera, and, you know, pretty much everybody has video experience at this point because of their phones. That's probably like the easiest entry way for me, writing code in a frame, while challenging, because I never did it before, wasn't super challenging, because I have been a coder for a long time. That being said, a frame is not super complex. So in that way, and it doesn't in its open source, so it's free. So I think in that way, it's it's not a difficult way to begin. But I think the more robust an experience you want, the more skills you're going to have to develop. So it really depends on what what your goals are. And I know in this experience, my supervisor, you know, every time we met and talked about it, they wisely said, yeah, scale it down, scale it down, you know, because it's easy to get really excited and start talking about all these things you want to achieve. But I think if you are working in a limited way, then having a simple idea that you can finish is better than having a complex idea that you may never get to the end of. Thank you. Yeah, welcome, Kathy back, who just rejoined. I'm going to drop the slides that I've created into a Dropbox and share them on the chat really quickly in a little bit. Hopefully everyone will be able to get those mostly just for the links to people's projects and other things like that. I'm going to take another quick question from the from the chat, which is just basically, I'm going to I'm going to expand it a little bit. The question is, do you envision VR being used for fact checking in the future? I think I can actually speak to that a little bit. But I think the larger question is, are there fields that, you know, are hard to do right now that could be that we could use VR to expand into what I was going to mention about fact checking is I'm going to get the name wrong. Probably someone on this panel remembers better than me. There was a bomb again, a chemical bomb dropped in Syria a few years ago. And I forget which group put together. I think it was the New York Times. I'm not sure who it worked with. Based on footage and photos from the immediate aftermath, they were able to put together kind of a 360 experience that helped prove in court that the Syrian government dropped that Bellingcat. Courtney, do you want to talk more about that? I think that's an interesting case. No, okay. Okay, sure. I don't I think that the I mean, I think that was a lot of information. You know, there are expert organizations that use, you know, various sorts of digital, you know, data and videos, et cetera, to cross reference and do that fact checking. So I think that's kind of there's a separation between, you know, I think Bellingcat, which was really helping to do the digital forensics. And then the New York Times, which was really about presenting some of the evidence and the fact checking. I mean, I do think VR is potentially powerful as a way of telling the story, because I have seen a lot of the Bellingcat charts. And I would say, you know, you can look at it as a layperson. And frankly, that chart, you know, sure, it looks factual, but you don't really know. But when you are able to put that into this immersive experience, it does seem, you know, to have more residents. But I guess I haven't really thought about VR for fact checking. And just on the top of it, my my head, I would seem that that would be challenging, because it's called virtual reality, which is then inherently somehow contradictory, or potentially contradictory to fact checking. And so I'm not sure. And also for like the production time needed, I'm not sure that it's really about fact checking. But I do think it could be about how to tell complicated stories from maybe different sets of facts that aren't necessarily visual. That's really helpful. Yeah, that you make a really good point. It's, I guess, what I was thinking of really was the way that the experience lends credence to the message they're trying to get across, and less that they used it to do the fact checking. That's a really good point. I want to just quickly ask, don't Kathy, go ahead. I was going to say, I mean, I think it's really important to talk about the ethics of this, though. This is one of the reasons I joined the cyber XR coalition, which is doing amazing work on privacy and digital rights in the VR space. So kind of not quite the EFF of VR, but, you know, I think we are very vulnerable when we're inside of a fantasy world to knowing what's real and what's not real. And I think it's really important that there are standards so that companies can't just lie to us and present information as though it's real, that our bodies feel like is really real. I think that's something we need to be really working on. Those of us who are concerned about digital rights and making sure that there are standards that they sign on to and agree to, because this is a communications tool that can be used very powerfully for propaganda, for good and for evil. So I really think it's important that all of us who are creating any kind of VR content at all talk about that wherever we go and whatever panels we're at and really raise that awareness around that, that actually needs to be taken. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, that's a really important note and one of the elements of that that I think we have talked a little bit about at EFF, at least internally, is the potential for online harassment in the virtual space, which is, you know, in many ways potentially even more intense than, you know, Twitter, where you might be able to block people, but thousands of trolls in a virtual world, you know, could make it unusable and Twitter has at least some ways to back out of that that would be harder to do perhaps in VR. So thank you for bringing that up. I want to ask everyone one quick question and I just kind of want to go backwards through the line about there's a lot of thoughts in the chat about organizations that are interested in creating VR. Let's close on just kind of what advice would you give to organizations that would be interested in starting a VR project? I'm going to start with Courtney and we'll go backwards from there. Yeah, I think knowing that there is this whole world out there and I think it would be, you know, it's developed quite a bit I think since we we did the project, but I would say, you know, having some idea of what you want to get out of it and if it is just about experimenting that's fine, but to think about, yeah, the whole picture I mean, the ethics of everything that we do in this human rights and digital rights space is critical and fundamental to the work. And so I think thinking about that really understanding how you're going to be able to use this or not like what are the, you know, what are the effects on people who are involved in it. And, you know, it is a cost benefit analysis, you know, I think, is this going to be the most impactful way to tell this story. Again, for us deciding that we can definitely do this through partnerships, because after I like I had a great VR idea, but after I costed it out, you know, the it was just going to be so much that it was clear that wasn't really the right direction. I think there's a lot of exciting things to do and, you know, being willing to maybe take a little bit of a risk, but also, you know, doing that in a fully knowledgeable and informed way. That's great advice. Thank you so much. I'm going to jump over to Artemis. Now, what would you what advice would you give to an or since you were a coder on one of these projects now from your perspective? You know, as a coder, I would be like, yeah, do it, because then you get to write cool code. So that's not the best advice maybe. I think the important thing is our project was about street level surveillance, which we already had on our extremely large text filled site. And that information wasn't well conveyed in that way. And so if your organization has information that you feel would really benefit from immersive storytelling, it would be worth it to explore if VR would be a better way to get that information to your community or to the public. Yeah, that's what I would say. That's I think that everyone needs to hear that. That's helpful. Rebecca, what about you? What would you offer his advice? Yeah, so you know, I would really emphasize that before going into it, just get clear on your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? What audiences are you trying to reach? And you know, a lot of it too is figuring out what is the story that you want to tell. And I think arriving at all of these answers really requires a lot of collaboration and creativity, you know, with your partners, with the people who are experts in this area. And then there's a lot of logistics, you're gonna have to think a lot very carefully about logistics. So making sure that you have enough, you know, staff resources and just dedicated time to make a plan from start to finish and think about that promotion plan at the end as well. Thank you. Thank you. I'll let Kathy kind of close out maybe the person who's done the most training on VR and helping other orgs work on it. What would you recommend people do in this space? Well, as both an executive director and someone who likes to play with code but is not great at it, I will say find the people who are experts. Find good partners that you have good communication with that also care about the work that you're doing outside of VR. Document your process, because it's really important for all of us who are doing VR to share what we know with others at this early stage in VR. And lastly, ask, I think what Courtney said is really true, ask does VR bring something new to this story or to this communication? And if it doesn't do it in traditional media, but if it brings something new, a new perspective, a new insight, a way that people can experience something that they don't know about yet and that they can learn to love by bringing it to them in VR, then it's a good choice to go into VR. And become part of our community XR community, because we'd love to help support other XR creators that are doing community-based public interest work. Thank you so much. Yeah, I will just say for my part, as a novice, being involved in the community is the best way to get started in their variety of these communities and places to kind of get involved. I've just dropped the PDF and the PowerPoint presentation in the chat. So there's a bunch of links in there as well as more information about everyone's experiences and the individual organizations that everyone here is representing. I think that's all we have time for. Thank you all so much. This has been really, really delightful. Thank you to Jason and Artemis especially, and really wonderful Rebecca and Courtney to see you and hear your work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.