5 Virtual Reality Projects That Will Change How You View the World

In 1915, two decades after the first commercial film premiered, American audiences packed cinemas to see “The Birth of a Nation,” a three-hour, silent epic directed by D.W. Griffith. The story of racial tensions during Reconstruction demonized intermarriage and championed the Ku Klux Klan as guardians of white women’s chastity. The nation’s first blockbuster, the movie gained popularity for reflecting contemporary fears of racial inclusivity; it possibly even exacerbated prejudices.

If one of the first major experiments in the new medium of film ended up with such a retrograde product, what should we expect from this century’s emerging medium, virtual reality? By immersing viewers in another world, as opposed to the passive experience of watching a movie, virtual reality’s storytelling has the potential to change our moral point of view. If Griffith’s century-old film mythologized men in white sheets, could VR help us see beyond our skin color?

That, essentially, is the goal. But as with most mediums, especially one that removes us from our surroundings, there’s always the danger of escapism in to fantasy. NationSwell examined five recent works (sometimes called “sims” or “experiences”) to see if filmmakers have found a new way to generate empathy.

A still from Nonny de la Peña’s “Project Syria Demo,” a VR sim about the life of refugees.

1. Embracing Our Differences

Nonny de la Peña is sometimes referred to as the “godmother of virtual reality.” At Emblematic Group, the VR company she founded a decade ago in Santa Monica, Calif., de la Peña brought the genre of “immersive journalism” (often pairing real sound with low-budget digital animations) to the mainstream with her short project “Hunger in Los Angeles,” which recreated the experience of waiting on line at a Skid Row food bank. Later films took viewers to a Syrian refugee camp and the Mexican border. This year, at the Sundance Film Festival, she debuted her most recent, “Out of Exile: Daniel’s Story,” about an LGBT youth coming out to his disapproving family. De la Peña, a former Newsweek correspondent, believes that VR can make viewers feel in a way no other artistic medium can. “If you feel like you’re there, then you feel like it could happen to you, too,” she recently told Los Angeles Magazine.

The “Perspective” series includes a story about sexual assault at a college party.

2. Adopting Another Perspective

For the last two years, Specular Theory’sPerspective” series, which premiered at Sundance in 2015, has been showing how social cues can be misinterpreted very quickly. Playing two sides back-to-back, the narratives by Rose Troche and Morris May show varying perspectives on a crime. In the first chapter, “The Party,” about sexual assault, a man and woman meet at an alcohol-soaked college kegger. Gina, the girl, passes out, too intoxicated; Brian, the boy, has sex with her anyway. This year, “The Misdemeanor” doubled the number of perspectives around a fictional officer-involved shooting in Brooklyn to four: a teenager who’s shot, his brother and two cops. “Who will approach the piece and only watch one thing and think that they have the story?” Troche said to Wired. “That’s pretty much what we have in real life. The piece demonstrates the fact that just because you’re there, doesn’t mean you see everything. Through the four strings, you get to see the full picture.”

Director Janicza Bravo was inspired from events in her own life when making “Hard World For Small Things.”

3. Contemplating the Bigger Picture

The Wevr-produced film “Hard World for Small Things,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016, likewise tackles police brutality. In the five-minute story, director Janicza Bravo, a black woman, retells a deeply personal story from her own life. In 1999, while on vacation from her native Panama, a cousin had been killed in Brooklyn while holding a bag of coke. After looking up the event, all Bravo could find were short write-ups in local newspapers. Bravo’s film goes beyond that brevity to capture a whole life, leading up to its final moments. “What if their lives were more than a couple of paragraphs; what if it was their friends, where they were going, what they had read, what they had desired, etc. I wanted to make a short piece that was emotionally longer than a paragraph, and that you got a slice of his life before he died. So when he died, it’s not about the event and what he did to have died; it becomes about who he was, his humor, his laugh,” Bravo has said. For her new sim, she transposed the story to a mini-mart in South Los Angeles, where police mistake someone’s identity and fire at him with questionable cause.

A Stanford University VR project puts a chainsaw in the hands of the viewer.

4. Respecting Animals and Nature

Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is bringing the rigors of academia to VR. At the university’s campus in Palo Alto, Calif., professor Jeremy Bailenson, the lab’s director, tests whether virtual reality can improve all life by making viewers more empathetic, more aware of the need for environmental conservation and more communicative. Essentially, he wonders, can visualizing the effects of our behavior change our actions? In one sim, a headset-equipped viewer grabs a chainsaw and cuts down a tree in a forest. In another film, after a person gets down on all fours and straps on the VR goggles, they become a cow grazing in a pasture before being driven to a slaughterhouse. It might just be enough for you to think twice about loading paper into a printer or ordering beef for dinner.

“It Can Wait” shows the dangers of texting while driving.

5. Putting Personal Responsibility in the Driver’s Seat

Even the lowly PSA is going virtual, too. Reel FX and AT&T’s recent commercial simulates the consequences of distracted driving. In “It Can Wait,” a person places her hand on a wheel before the simulation starts. She motors around a neighborhood while texting, barely avoiding bikers, swerving cars and schoolchildren in the crosswalk. As you can guess, the experience ends in tragedy. “Although people admit that such behavior is terrible and that they do it, they don’t necessarily see themselves as part of the problem. What people are doing is rationalizing that there is a safe way to do it,” Michelle Kuckelman, executive director of brand management at AT&T, told USA Today. By experiencing the film, participants get to see the danger from afar, while still catching a glimpse of disaster up close.

Continue reading “5 Virtual Reality Projects That Will Change How You View the World”

Erecting Skyscrapers With Climate Change in Mind, Coping With Pain Through Virtual Reality and More

 
Building to the Sky, With a Plan for Rising Waters, The New York Times
As climate change becomes impossible to ignore, real estate developers are adjusting their plans for rising storms and sea levels. A new waterfront property in New York City features generators with the ability to power tenants’ refrigerators and power outlets for a week, because “if you have your phone and your refrigerator, you can survive,” as one designer put it. After devastating hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, “resilient design” has become the buzzword in architecture.
Virtually Painless — How VR Is Making Surgery Simpler, Science Focus
Could VR headsets replace painkillers? That’s what a handful of surgeons are betting on in regions where sedatives are expensive and hard to come by. Once a high-tech luxury, virtual reality is becoming ever more mainstream and affordable, and has proven to reduce patient pain by up to 50 percent.
First Class Meal: Could the Declining U.S. Postal Service Deliver Food to the Needy? The Guardian
A creative proposal from students at Washington University in St. Louis aims to turn the stagnant U.S. Postal Service into a thriving food delivery service for underserved communities. A number of organizations are working to curb food waste in a nation where, despite its wealth, one in seven residents experiences food insecurity. But most lack a sustainable transport system to get surplus food to those in need. With vehicles, routes and workers already in place, the declining postal service could be an invaluable resource in the fight against hunger.
Continue reading “Erecting Skyscrapers With Climate Change in Mind, Coping With Pain Through Virtual Reality and More”

These 10 Documentaries Will Change How You See America

Documentary films are known for sparking social change. (Case in point: Who wants to eat at McDonalds after seeing Super Size Me or Food, Inc.? What parent suggests visiting SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish?) Though 2014’s nonfiction films weren’t massive box office hits, they pointed out injustice and lifted our eyes to the doers making a difference. Here are the 10 must-see documentaries that inspired us to action.

10. The Great Invisible

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 still darkens the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in the form of altered ecosystems and ruined lives. Named best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, Margaret Brown’s documentary dives deep beyond the news coverage you may remember into a tale of corporate greed and lasting environmental damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDw1budbZpQ

9. If You Build It

Two designers travel to the poorest county in rural North Carolina to teach a year-long class, culminating in building a structure for the community. In this heartwarming story, 10 students learn much more than construction skills.
http://vimeo.com/79902240

8. The Kill Team

An infantry soldier struggles with his wartime experience after alerting the military his Army platoon had killed civilians in Afghanistan. On the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ long list for best documentary, Dan Krauss’s challenging film shows how morality dissolves in the fog of war and terror of battle.

7. Starfish Throwers

Three people — a renowned cook, a preteen girl and a retired teacher — inspire an international movement to end hunger. Jesse Roesler’s film includes the story of Allan Law, the man who handed out 520,000 sandwiches during the course of a year in Minneapolis, which we featured on NationSwell.

6. Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story

A former Navy SEAL (formerly named Christopher, now Kristin) says that changing genders, not military service, was the biggest battle of her life. In retrospect, her SEAL experience takes on new importance as she comes to understand the true value of the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

5. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

An online pioneer who developed Creative Commons with the academic and political activist Lawrence Lessig at age 15 and co-founded Reddit at 19, Swartz crusaded for a free and open internet. Another potential Oscar candidate, the film poignantly recounts how Swartz ended his own life at age 26 after aggressive prosecutors initiated a federal case against him.

4. True Son

A 22-year-old black man recently graduated from Stanford returns to his bankrupt hometown of Stockton, Calif., to run for city council. Michael Tubbs convinces his neighbors (and the movie’s audiences) you can have “a father in jail and a mother who had you as a teenager, and still have a seat at the table.”

3. The Hand That Feeds

After years of abuse from their bosses, a group of undocumented immigrants working for a New York City bakery unionize for fair wages and better working conditions. Led by a demure sandwich maker, the employees partner with young activists to fight their case against management and the food chain’s well-connected investors.

2. Rich Hill

Three boys confront impoverishment, learning disabilities and dysfunctional families in this human portrait of growing up in small-town America. The backdrop to the teenagers’ lives is their Missouri hometown of 1,396 residents, where one in five lives in poverty and where the fireworks still glow every Fourth of July.
 

1. The Overnighters

Our top film and a favorite for an Academy Award nomination details how an oil boom draws a city-sized influx of workers to a small town in North Dakota, where they scrape by on day labor and live in their cars. With the heft, detail and narrative twists of a Steinbeck novel, Jesse Moss profiles the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke, who welcomes these desperate men into a shelter called “The Overnighters,” to his congregation’s dismay.
 

Are there any documentaries that should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments below.

This Second Grader Saved for a Pet Snake, But Decided to Feed the Poor Instead

Eight-year-old Keaton Snell of Winter Haven, Fla., assiduously saved his allowance and birthday money for months, trying to accumulate enough to buy himself a snake. Once he’d saved $114, he approached his mom about getting the pet, but she said he needed to wait until he was 10-years-old.
Keaton wanted to spend the money this year, however, so he decided to buy food for those less fortunate.
He got the idea from his second grade class, which has been talking about ways the kids can help the community and holding a food drive. His teacher, Lori Davis, tells the News Chief, “We’ve been having conversations about the less fortunate, and Keaton is particularly sympathetic about it. He came to me and said, ‘I want to spend $114 on food for the poor,’ and I thought that’s a lot of money, but it was totally his idea and it shows how deep in his heart he feels about this.”
Keaton started by raiding his pantry to give to others. His mom, Shannon Snell, says “I kept telling him he can’t give all of our food away. We need some, too. So it came to the point where he was like, ‘Mom, just take me to the grocery store, and I’ll buy the food.”
Shannon made a deal with her son that she would match his contributions. Keaton ended up donating 72 cans, which will stock the food pantry at The Mission, a Winter Haven, Fla., church organization that feeds the hungry and helps the homeless.
Keaton’s classmates were donating an average of about two cans per person, but when they saw all the cans he brought, it inspired them to give more.
Davis says, “He came into school with two bags overflowing with cans. The other kids saw it, we talked about Keaton using his own money and they all got really excited about it. They started bringing in more cans and we saw the school count rise a lot.”
So far, the school has collected 3,000 cans of food. As for Keaton, he may not yet have a pet snake, but his teacher rewarded him with one week during which he doesn’t have to wear his school uniform. “He went above and beyond,” Davis says.
MORE: When Skiers Leave Behind Warm Clothing, These Teens Dole it Out to the Homeless

The Ability to Fight Hunger and Obesity is Right at Your Fingertips

How many times have you heard someone proclaim that they’re going on a diet? When this declaration is made, the person usually sticks with a few weeks, but then becomes bored with the food selection and falls off the wagon.
Well, one man thinks he may have found the solution to this dilemma and our country’s hunger problem at the same time. It’s called FoodTweeks and it’s an app that donates your “saved” calories to a local food bank.
America is a giant paradox when it comes to food: More than 200 million people overweight and obese, yet at the same time, another 49 million go hungry. After doing research about both topics , the idea for FoodTweeks popped into founder Evan Walker’s head.
“Two years ago, a small team of us were trying to figure out how we could get 50 million Americans — the approximate number you would need to have any meaningful change in the country— to have an easier and more successful time of managing their weight,” Walker explains. “Diets are not sustainable, and most people go running from food that has the label ‘healthy’ attached to it.”
So, how is this one app going to solve both problems? Well, every time a person eats something (whether it’s at home or at a restaurant) they log the food item into FoodTweeks. It then suggests ways to make the meal a little healthier, and the consumer can choose the most appetizing alternative.
After a selection is made, FoodTweeks calculates how many calories are saved for that meal. For every 600 calories saved, the app donates a meal of that caloric amount to a local food bank.
“Millions of families do not have reliable access to nutritious food. In a serendipitous twist, it turns out that addressing both of these problems at the same time is easier than dealing with them individually,” Walker says. “Turning our users’ actions into donations encourages them to continue making their calorie-reducing changes.”
Helping a person in need might just be that extra motivation that most of us need.
MORE: Are Marketing Tricks the Secret to Making Healthier Choices?

When Food Is Left Unharvested, This Organization Gleans It and Feeds the Hungry

Dotting the Maine countryside are small plots growing more fruits and vegetables than the farmers who work the land could ever pick. But despite this bountifulness, some of the state’s residents forgo buying produce because of tight budgets.
This is where Hannah Semler, the coordinator of the gleaning initiative for the nonprofit Healthy Acadia, steps in. Semler leads a team of volunteers to pick whatever is left after farmers have harvested as much as they can.
In Blue Hill, Amanda Provencher and Paul Schultz of King Hill Farm welcome her regularly to their fields. “We just don’t have time to pick everything we grow, so we’d just till it right back into the soil or feed it to the animals, but it’s still totally good food,” Schultz tells Seth Freed Wessler of NBC News. “Hannah is identifying a resource that we have that otherwise we just would not be utilized because there are not enough hours in the day.”
At King Hill Farm and 18 other Maine farms, Semler and the volunteers for Healthy Acadia glean 30,000 pounds of food a year that would otherwise go to waste. They deliver it to food pantries for the needy and to the Magic Food Bus (sponsored by Healthy Peninsula), which delivers produce to schools and housing complexes for elderly people.
According to Wessler, about 40 percent of American crops are never harvested. Meanwhile, 15 percent of Americans are food insecure (i.e. they don’t have enough healthy food).
Rick Traub, the president of Tree of Life, a Maine food pantry that distributes food that Semler collects, tells Wessler, “Poverty here is everywhere. I go to the grocery store and the person who cashes me out, I see her the next day at the pantry. The problem of hunger in the U.S. has very little to do with a scarcity of food. There’s far more food available around here than people to eat it. The problem is really about access.”
With a team of volunteers using their time and muscle to harvest good produce that otherwise would go to waste, access to nutritious food is expanding in Maine. Let’s hope this practice spreads to other states, too.
MORE: How 40 Pounds of Leftover Broccoli Sparked A Farm-Friendly Innovation
 

Once This Woman Realized the Vast Number of Homeless, She Started Making Sandwiches

To make a sandwich, all you need are a few simple ingredients: two pieces of bread, some peanut butter and a little jelly. For Erin Dinan, though, that isn’t enough, so she’s added a fourth ingredient — compassion — making her sandwiches, and those made by volunteers at One Sandwich at a Time, not just sources of food — but rather, instruments of change.
Originally from the South, Dinan moved to New York City to study art and photography. One day while running through Grand Central Station, she was struck by her interaction with a homeless man who asked her for help. While many would have kept moving, Dinan gave half of her sandwich to the man without a second thought.
“It’s amazing because the look of gratitude on his face,” Dinan told Starting Good. “He was surprised and grateful that someone was helping him to make it to his next meal.”
It was that moment and the look on his face that inspired her. Going forth, she started packing extra sandwiches in her bag and distributing them to the homeless people on the streets. Sometimes, she would stop and talk with them, while other times she simply dropped it into their laps and kept moving.
From there, the movement spread as her friends and family encouraged her to start the nonprofit that now feeds thousands.
So how does one woman feed New York’s hungry and homeless?
Dinan has turned her small actions into a large scale 501(c)(3) charity. One Sandwich at a Time operates with the help of donations from food suppliers, such as local bakeries and Whole Foods, and local kitchen areas.
The charity hosts sandwich-making events, which businesses donate kitchen space for. The night before, Dinan will drop off all of the supplies and the following evening, volunteers will pour into the kitchen and start making sandwiches at the various stations.The events last for about two hours in the evening, and volunteers, equipped with hairnets and gloves, can stay for as long as they like. The next day, the sandwiches are packed into vans and brought to local shelters and food kitchens to be distributed.
“That’s why it’s grown because people are busy in city, and if they want to pop in and make one sandwich then go home, they have made a difference,” Dinan told Starting Good. “If someone stays for two hours and makes a hundred sandwiches, then they’ve made a huge difference.”
At Dinan’s first sandwich-making event, about 400 sandwiches were made. However, that’s a modest number compared to the 800 to 2,000 sandwiches made at her affairs now.
While One Sandwich at a Time continues to grow in New York City, Dinan hopes to expand the group into other cities, and maybe create chapters across the world.
“There is a deeper level of homelessness that we won’t understand,” Dinan told Starting Good. “So we open our hearts and show compassion, and show them that someone cares and maybe they will realize that they can get out of this.”
Who knew that opening your lunch box and sharing half a sandwich could make such a difference?
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Short on Cash? That’s No Problem at This Farmer’s Market

The way it typically works at a farmer’s market (and with just about every retailer, in fact): You pay money and in exchange, you go home with a bunch of fresh produce.
But at the go-go fresco farmer’s market in Charlotte, North Carolina, if you don’t have enough money to pay for your greens, you don’t have to worry.
Huh?
If you’re telling yourself that there must be a catch, there’s not. The farmer’s market frequently operates on the pay-what-you-can principle that’s already the basis for many cafés across the country.
Even better: You might not have to drive across town to visit go-go fresco, since it visits 10 different locations each week, with the goal of bringing fresh produce to people who might not be able to access it otherwise.
Two of the locations are designed to reach low-income families and that’s where patrons can pay what they care to — either the suggested price, a bit more to help another shopper out, or less if that’s all they’ve got. Go-go fresco also accepts food stamps and often donates produce (which it buys from local farmers) to the non-profits that host their mobile market: The YWCA and the Children and Family Services Center.
“We have good weeks and some bad weeks, but it balances out,” Nick Knock (who founded go-go fresco with Leconte Lee) told Mark Price of the Charlotte Observer. “It’s inspiring to see the hearts and generosity of people who don’t think twice about paying more so someone in need can get fresh food.”
Knock told Price that there have been a few times when he wondered if patrons were taking advantage of the pay-what-you-want option, “But then I saw that they only had $3.19 left on their (food stamp) account, and I got choked up. They were spending what little money they had left at our market. It was mind-blowing when you think they were able to get food because of us.”
MORE: The Restaurant Without A Cash Register

Meet the Woman Who Does a Lot of Good During Her Lunch Hour

Now this is how you make the most of a lunch break.
While many of us use this time to scarf down a sandwich, run to the post office, or pick up a birthday card, Chicago’s Kasonja Holley uses her precious hour to give back to her community.
Every Thursday for the last two years, Holley takes about $120 of own money to buy and deliver 20 boxed lunches to Chicago’s homeless. And as WGN reports, she doesn’t just give out food — she also hands out household necessities like face towels, deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, and other toiletries.
It’s all part of her “Love in Motion” project to help feed the hungry and inspire others in the process.
ALSO: Would You Notice Your Loved Ones If They Were Living on the Street?
Why would she do such a thing? As Holley told WGN, “It’s really not for me….I don’t look for any reward. I just do it because it’s a good thing to do.”
The Huffington Post reports that besides having a full-time office job, Holley is also a part-time suite attendant at the United Center to help cover costs for Love in Motion. She also has a GoFundMe page to keep her project funded.
Incredibly, after news got out about her work, her fundraising site received a flood of donations, collecting over $4,800 in just three days.
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She wrote on her GoFundMe page that “EVERY PENNY of this money will go toward helping the less fortunate,” adding, that she’s raised enough money to purchase lunches for an entire year.
While some of Chicago’s homeless won’t go hungry on Thursdays because of people like Kasonja Holley, there are way too many Americans who do not have money for food or a home. According to a report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there are more than 610,000 people who currently do not have a roof over their heads.
However, it’s big hearts like Holley’s that demonstrate we don’t have to do a lot to make a big difference. And perhaps it can start by simply stepping away from that desk during lunch.
MORE: Why This Pastor Continues to Feed the Homeless, Even After the Police Told Him to Stop

There’s More Than Meets the Eye to This Picnic in the Park

During the school year, lunch often isn’t a problem for low-income kids because they benefit from subsidized meals. But when summer rolls around, well, it’s another thing: Hunger becomes a real threat.
In Idaho, that situation is a bigger problem than you might realize. In fact, more than 90,000 kids experience hunger, according to the Idaho Foodbank.
The nonprofit doesn’t want these children to spend an entire summer with rumbling stomachs, so this year they are continuing their popular Picnic in the Park program — a massive effort to provide 60,000 meals to needy kids in the Boise area.
The initiative has 27 lunch giveaways planned for the summer— the majority of which will happen in public parks. During the noontime gatherings, Parks and Recreation Department employees and volunteers will be on hand to lead kids in exercise and games and the Idaho Commission for Libraries will bring bookmobiles to the events. The Idaho State Department of Education, the Boise School District, and Old Chicago Restaurant are also involved, contributing various things.
“I don’t know if there’s a better collaborative effort than this,” said Boise Mayor Dave Bieter told George Prentice of Boise Weekly. “Getting kids moving, reading, making good friends and developing healthy habits…this just gets better every year.”
Marty Zahn of Old Chicago explained to Prentice how the events work. “As the kids are eating their lunches, we begin some interactions…some small talk, asking them about their plans for the summer and whatnot. Then, it’s just natural to ask them to play some games.”
And after a nutritious lunch, the kids certainly have plenty of energy to play, read, and make friends.
MORE: This Young Child Has Big Plans to Feed His Hungry Peers