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Filmmaker David Darg climbs a mountain of life vests discarded by refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos.


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Filmmaker David Darg climbs a mountain of life vests discarded by refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos.

Guy Martin / Panos

Crisis and Opportunity

How One VR Startup Is

Capturing the 360-Degree

Reality of the World’s

Most Vulnerable People

By Abe Streep 07.15.16

F

Four boats approach the small harbor of Skala on the Greek island of Lesbos. The first vessel is occupied by agents of Frontex, the European Union border-control unit. The men are dressed in black, from helmets to combat boots. They tow the second boat, an inflatable dinghy with flimsy plywood baseboards that’s crammed from pontoon to pontoon with extremely cold people. Earlier this morning a smuggler in Izmir, Turkey, filled the raft with refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, handed the throttle to a young man who’d never driven a boat, and pointed toward Greece. Like so many of the thousands of vessels provided by human-smuggling mafias, this one didn’t have enough fuel and ran out of gas somewhere in the middle of the Aegean.

The third boat, a gray Zodiac, found them. It’s manned by two young men—one an out-of-work Greek, the other a Norwegian bored with his stultifying Oslo desk job. Neither of them possesses an organizational affiliation. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have come through Lesbos in the past year, as of my visit on December 18, neither Frontex nor the Greek coast guard has established much of a presence. Instead, the job of offering aid falls largely to international volunteers who have flocked to the island. A throng of them, their experience ranging from extensive to none, waits onshore with reflective survival blankets. The emergencies director of Human Rights Watch is here, as is a fashion model from Manhattan who brought perfume samples for the refugees. As the Zodiac approaches the dock, the Norwegian hurls himself into the water and ties the boat up to a mooring.

Behind the scene trails the fourth boat, a wooden vessel owned by a local fisherman. On the bow, a bearded American named David Darg holds up a small virtual-reality camera called a Ricoh Theta. Thirty-seven years old, with a reddish-brown beard, tight black jeans, and the thick build of a logger, Darg occupies a unique and peculiar role within the fast-moving world of new media.1 On the one hand he’s a crisis responder and vice president of international operations at Operation Blessing, a faith-based nonprofit. But he’s also cofounder of Ryot, a Los Angeles for-profit company that specializes in hopeful video content from developing and disaster-affected nations. He has come to Lesbos to bring the reality of the migrant crisis to the wider world. Darg calls the VR camera in his hand a “transportation device,” one capable of essentially bringing Western viewers to the world’s strife-ridden places. “You register VR as an experience you had,” he says, “rather than something you see”—a common boast about VR.

“A lot of people will make a very cool, very expensive VR experience that very few people will see.”

This phenomenon, he suggests, allows him to convey nuanced reality like never before, cutting through a media landscape saturated with two-dimensional images of suffering. It’s also essential to his plan to change the way we consume global news. Darg and Ryot’s other cofounder, a former Peace Corps volunteer named Bryn Mooser, launched the company in 2012 while giving aid in post-earthquake Haiti. Mooser, Ryot’s CEO, is 36, a tall and charismatic entrepreneur who grew up in Santa Monica and moved to Zimbabwe with his mother at age 16, eventually studying film at Bennington College and joining the Peace Corps in Gambia. Darg and Mooser’s idea was to create a new form of short, impactful storytelling to buoy the humanitarian industry. At first the company billed itself as the future of news—a sell that seemed rather ambitious, sort of like an undermanned expansion team declaring itself the future of the NBA.

But in the past year, Ryot has positioned itself as the go-to VR company for both news and humanitarian advocacy. Recently the Huffington Post, NPR, and The New York Times have lined up to work with the company. Darg, who speaks in a calm, self-assured voice, finds the old guard’s attention delicious. “They’re coming and they’re asking us for advice,” he says. “Men in suits wondering what happened now that no one’s coming to their sites any more.”2

The Greek fisherman ties up to his mooring and Darg hops out. The volunteers swarm the asylum seekers, offering blankets and water. A CNN anchor cues her cameraman and says in a dire tone that the organizer of the Paris ISIS attacks may have come through Lesbos. An Australian woman in a “Love” beanie gives a head massage to a middle-aged Muslim refugee, whose face maintains an expression of mild horror. Other refugees take selfies. Soon everyone moves up the shoreline, past a lighthouse, an olive press, limp life jackets hanging in trees, and a relief camp run by anarchists, where two dogs in wool vests lounge amiably. The group reaches another ad hoc camp, where refugees receive food and dry clothes. On the street, Darg turns his VR camera onto a young Afghan named Mustafa and asks him to address Americans who are afraid of refugees.

Mustafa’s message is simple: “I lost my parents. I would love to be beside them and not here.” And then, just as he starts to thank Lesbos’ aid workers, a locally famous cross-dresser sashays by the shivering refugees in knee-high boots and red tights, his gray hair blowing in the wind. Darg’s camera is still running.

R

Ryot’s name is intended to evoke both a Hindi peasant and a Silicon Valley-type disruption. The company represents a collision of documentary storytelling, technology, celebrity, and the aid industry. It’s the sort of odd mashup that can thrive in an era when traditional media outlets are scrambling to compete with content produced and distributed instantaneously, often by people with little training. Ryot is run by experienced filmmakers, but they enthusiastically embrace a figure-it-out-on-the-fly approach. Other companies, like Emblematic Group and Vrse, aim to produce mind-blowing VR experiences; Ryot’s goals are at once less artistic and more ambitious. “We’re going to build the world’s largest 360-degree news network,” Mooser says. “We’re going to evolve the news.”

To hear Mooser and Darg tell it, this evolution involves disposing with the kind of objectivity that traditional journalists hold dear. Ryot is unapologetically boosterish about the humanitarian industry, producing VR content for nonprofits at little or no cost and also suggesting that viewers of its films donate to aid organizations. Darg and Mooser envision a future in which journalists don’t simply document suffering but actively work to ease it, in which news consumers don’t merely read about humanitarian crises but rather transport themselves there via VR, then take action by donating to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on the ground, or by signing petitions. “VR can create empathy like never before,” Darg tells me. “It’s the ultimate fund-raising tool.”

At the core of Ryot’s ascension lies that much-trafficked word—empathy—and the promise of donor largesse it brings. The group is deeply intertwined with international NGOs, relationships born out of Darg’s and Mooser’s experiences in postearthquake Haiti. There Darg, a disaster responder since 2005, worked for Operation Blessing, while Mooser built schools for Artists for Peace and Justice, an NGO started by Paul Haggis, the former Scientologist and Oscar-winning screenwriter and director.

“We’re going to build the world’s largest 360-degree news network,” Ryot CEO Bryn Mooser says.
“We’re going to build the world’s largest 360-degree news network,” Ryot CEO Bryn Mooser says.Brent Humphreys

The two started the company because they felt traditional media were ignoring the efforts of the international aid industry. For Ryot’s first few years, its website consisted of blogs and traditional 2-D videos linked to donation pages, so that readers could donate to causes. The company also made short films that did well in festivals. Baseball in the Time of Cholera, about a youth baseball league Darg and Mooser started together in Haiti during a disease outbreak, won a jury award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2012. More recently, Ryot secured an HBO deal for Body Team 12, a haunting and forceful short documentary about a Liberian Red Cross worker removing corpses from Ebola-affected villages. Still, as of January 2015, Ryot consisted of only eight people, most of whom slept on the floor at the company’s office near Venice, California.3

Then came the commercial VR surge. In January 2015, at the Davos World Economic Forum, Vrse showed a film called Clouds Over Sidra, about life in a UN refugee camp in Jordan. Viewers took their headsets off in tears. The following month, Chris Milk, the founder of Vrse, gave a popular TED talk in which he stated, “Through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected. And ultimately we become more human.” The UN showed the film at fund-raising events, claiming that it helped raise $3.8 billion from donors, and launched a virtual-reality division. As VR fever spread among nonprofits—everyone from World Vision to Greenpeace has since commissioned VR films—Ryot took notice.

On April 25, 2015, Darg was in New York when news broke that an earthquake had devastated Nepal. He borrowed a VR camera from a friend and headed to the airport. In Kathmandu he made a short VR film called The Nepal Quake Project. Mooser recruited Susan Sarandon, a donor to Artists for Peace and Justice, to narrate. The result is clunky, with blurry parallaxes—the problematic lines where two cameras’ fields of vision meet—and a blank spot in the VR sphere where one of the GoPros lost its juice. But some moments are transporting, as when the camera is placed in the cavern of a ruined building outside Kathmandu. In May, Mooser and Darg showed The Nepal Quake Project at Mountainfilm in Telluride, Colorado. Viewers there too left their headsets in tears. The Nepal Quake Project has since been viewed more than 100,000 times on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Gear VR, and in Ryot’s app, and was shown at several galas. It helped raise $150,000 for quake relief.

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Following this success, Mooser and Ryot’s chief marketing officer, an enterprising 28-year-old named Molly Swenson, reached out to NGOs and corporations about making VR content. Mooser enlisted the help of a number of his celebrity friends. The Sierra Club used the company to make a climate-change film narrated by Jared Leto. Pencils of Promise, an educational nonprofit, asked Ryot to make a film set at a school in Ghana and aired it at its annual gala, which raised $1.9 million. Walgreens and PepsiCo soon hired Ryot to make VR films.

Ryot dispatched VR shooters in Jordan, South Africa, France, Syria, and Greece. Mooser and Swenson sought $2 million in seed money, more than tripling the Ryot staff in nine months. “If VR doesn’t take off, we’ll go down in a blaze of blood and guts,” he tells me. In the meantime, he says, “we think we can help make the world a better place.” This might sound rather grandiosese, but Mooser often makes such statements. He has an entrepreneur’s optimism and the sort of earnest credulity often found among aid workers. What he doesn’t have is a journalist’s skepticism.

As a more traditional journalist with stodgy notions about the value of an independent press, I was eager to see the empathy machine in action. Ryot’s particular brand of immersive storytelling seems complicated. Handled well, it could promote connection and compassion; handled poorly, it seems like it could foster a new brand of disaster tourism, enabling the privileged to traipse in and out of videogamelike crisis zones.

Which is why Darg invited me to join him in Lesbos in December. When I first landed on the island, he picked me up in a rental with a trunk full of orange juice, water, and crackers paid for by Operation Blessing, which was founded by televangelist Pat Robertson and has an annual budget in excess of $245 million. The trunk also contained a DSLR camera, a drone, and two VR cameras—the Theta and a custom 3-D-printed rig with seven embedded GoPros. We drove a couple of miles down the road, pulled over at a small cliff, and looked out at an ocean full of desperate vessels.


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David Darg wades out to a boat with his VR camera as refugees arrive from Turkey at the Greek island of Lesbos.

Guy Martin / Panos

A

A Syrian med student with a blond-flecked beard stands next to a Greek flag in the stern of a crammed, low-riding gray dinghy, holding up a smartphones to film his arrival. A throng of volunteers cheers onshore. Beside them stand a few tough-looking Greek men in galoshes with knives—salvage entrepreneurs who tear the grounded boats apart to reuse or sell the wood and engines.

Darg, clad in a wet suit, crashes through the water, Theta camera held overhead. Soon he’s behind the student, attempting to capture the perspective of an arriving Syrian. When the boat lands, the volunteers cheer and the refugees pass the children forward to get them out first. The salvagers shoulder through the crowd to get at the boat, deconstructing it with brutal efficiency. Once ashore, the med student rips off his life vest and lights a cigarette.

How was the trip? Darg asks.

“The waves were high.”

Why did you leave?

“Everything is death,” he says. “There is one word to describe Syria now: death.”

A passing helicopter ruins Darg’s audio. We drive north to a beach where a boat of Central Asian and North African migrants is reaching land. An Egyptian woman is screaming, unable to move her frozen leg. Volunteers wrap the migrants in reflective blankets, then shuttle them to vans operated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which has the unenviable task of managing the chaos in the absence of effective local authority.

We drive around, pulling over whenever we see a scrum of volunteers beckoning in a boat. Four boats, five boats, six boats. Many have run out of gas. Most are overfull. Many migrants weep or shake with cold, but even so, they insist on celebratory selfies before accepting aid. Seven, eight, nine, 10 boats. “Syria, Syria, Syria!” they yell.

Watching Darg work, I wonder if he’ll feel the need to frame shots of suffering in a canned way. The opposite turns out to be true. For documentary, VR cameras require mostly that one get out of the shot. Darg uses the Theta to shoot from the perspective of an arriving boat, holding the camera above his head to keep himself out of the sphere of vision. Onshore, he has set up his GoPro rig, hit Record, and walked away. The camera catches everything, and the real work comes later, in postproduction.

Traveling with us is photojournalist Guy Martin, who survived a 2011 mortar attack in Libya that killed photojournalist colleagues Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros. At one point he says, “I spend my life going to the ends of the earth, looking for the perfect angle, the perfect light, the perfect moment. Darg just sets up his camera and that’s it.”

Much has been made of the storytelling challenges in VR due to the lack of visual hierarchy in a 360-degree space. I ask Darg about this. How do you tell a powerful story like Body Team 12, which keeps its star at the center of the frame for most of the film, in VR? Darg says he doesn’t know. “I lament the loss of artistry,” he says, “but from a humanitarian perspective, this trumps the artistry.”

Darg, who doesn’t take a salary from Ryot, considers himself a crisis responder first and a filmmaker second, but he frequently blurs the line between his two roles. At a camp for Syrians, Darg offers a few thousand euros cash from Operation Blessing to support the nonprofit that is feeding the refugees. Afterward, we have unique access. This is not the sort of practice you’ll find reporters from The New York Times or, say, WIRED engaging in. Paying for access increases the likelihood that an interviewee will tell you what you want to hear; it aligns storyteller and subject. When I later suggest to Darg that his donation could be seen as a quid pro quo, he’s genuinely shocked. “That donation was made to provide kitchen supplies for the kids in the camp,” he says. “And a byproduct was that I was able to promote the work of the nonprofit. I’d say some straight-up journalism is a form of exploitation.” Here he refers to a famous photo, taken by Kevin Carter, of a vulture standing near a starving child. “You’re going in and not providing anything, and I’m helping.”

The notion of absolute objectivity in news gathering is a fiction. I’ve handed out food while working in disaster zones and have, after reporting, suggested that friends donate to specific organizations whose work struck me as worthy. But that’s a far cry from paying thousands at the gate. Darg’s rationale for the interaction in Lesbos seems problematic, the kind of thinking that may be good for NGOs but would also prevent him from examining the aid industry with any clarity. I’m glad those volunteers can now afford a new stove; I also hope this sort of arrangement doesn’t constitute the future of news.

Inside the camp, Darg records an interview with a young Syrian man who calls himself Dani Dark. A thoughtful metalhead with long hair, Dani nearly drowned on his crossing. He says things like “There are racists in Syria and racists in USA; there are extremely religious people in USA and the same in Syria.” He reminds American viewers that their ancestors were migrants. He says that ISIS wants to kill him because he looks, to them, like a Satan worshipper. “Fuck Satan!” he says.

It’s an ideal interview for a filmmaker seeking to create compassion for refugees. Much research shows that it’s easier to empathize with those we see as somehow familiar, like, say, a Syrian metalhead. Days later, Darg releases a sanitized version of the Dani Dark film on YouTube and Facebook 360, Ryot’s primary distribution outlet, where 59,000 people tune in.

On another afternoon, we drive to the north end of the island, climbing through olive trees. We crest a hill and come upon the carcasses of wooden boats used by migrants. Beyond them sits a dump full of life vests forming great hills of neon orange. We approach and are engulfed by a raw and desperate odor of salt and rot. Once atop the vests, Darg props up his GoPro rig. From here his cameras can see the broken boats, the Aegean, and an old man scavenging for wood and rubber in the dump. The wind howls. “This is the perfect VR scene,” Darg says. “It allows you to capture something from every direction.”


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In the absence of an effective local authority, volunteers and aid workers help the arriving refugees.

Guy Martin / Panos

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The propaganda film was born of ill intent in the early 20th century: Touchstones include WWI-era pro-war film The Battle Cry of Peace; D. W. Griffith’s racist epic, The Birth of a Nation; and the Nazi-backing oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl. Jacques Cousteau turned the form into a tool for environ­mental advocates in the 1950s, with maritime epics like The Silent World. The Sierra Club started making pro-conservation films around the same time, and Greenpeace mastered the form in the ’70s when it trained its cameras on nuclear test zones and whaling ships. The humanitarian movement bought in later—Amnesty International being an early adopter in 1976 with More Than a Million Years, a short film about political imprisonment in Indonesia before and after the 1965 coup.

But making films about human misery in order to raise awareness and money brings with it singular challenges. Some prominent early efforts—notably Sally Struthers’ films for the Christian Children’s Fund—are now seen as cringeworthy and exploitative. (Struthers’ films featured starving children and scolded viewers into donating.) Groups like the International Rescue Committee, Unicef, and Amnesty International all make films now, but they tread with great care. “There are different challenges when portraying people in need versus the Earth in crisis,” says Cathe Neukum, executive producer for the International Rescue Committee. The most effective propaganda often involves the sort of shock that, lacking context, can feel insensitive at best.

VR promises to change that. Vrse’s Clouds Over Sidra contained little in the way of shock value. It was merely a girl in a camp telling her story. “It’s easy to be tempted by real action and the motivation of shock value,” says Gabo Arora, director of the United Nations’ virtual reality lab, who shot Sidra with Chris Milk. “But we become numb to it. In the long term, with VR, we relate to the ordinariness of daily life, and that’s more respectful.”

The VR-as-panacea narrative may be overcooked. The majority of studies have shown VR to cause just moderate increases in empathy.

For many who work in VR, the prefacing adjective—virtual—can seem incidental. When I speak with Vrse’s Milk, he says, “If you’re looking through a rectangle on your phones or computer, you’re looking at a window through which you’re seeing a story about people over there. VR makes it a story about us here. And that changes your emotional perception.”

But the VR-as-panacea narrative may be overcooked. For the past decade, researchers at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab have been studying whether VR can actually increase empathy. The lab has performed about a dozen studies since 2001 using the technique of embodiment—subjects wearing body-movement sensors and headsets and watching their avatars as members of another gender, race, or age group. This method is predicted to be a more powerful tool than films like Clouds Over Sidra or The Nepal Quake Project, which drop the viewer into a virtual environment. The majority of studies have shown VR to cause moderate increases in empathy, with a few exceptions. In one study, people who embodied other races showed increased negative stereotyping attitudes afterward. Another study involving young people and virtual elders found that embodiment and empathy couldn’t overcome a strong perceived threat.

“VR is a great tool for augmenting empathy,” says Jamil Zaki, a Stanford neuroscientist and one of the authors of the ageism study. “But if I don’t want to empathize with you, a VR helmet might not make a big difference. It’s important to not confuse the tool that makes you better at something with that thing itself.”

Unicef claims that Clouds Over Sidra doubled the likelihood that passersby on the street would give money to the organization. This prompted VR fever among NGOs, with everyone from Amnesty to Greenpeace to Planned Parenthood embracing the medium. But when I call up Pencils of Promise, the educational nonprofit that Ryot produced a film for, I’m told that it raised the same amount of money at its past two annual galas—in 2015 with a VR experience and in 2014 without one. “There’s a bit of a race because no one wants to feel left out,” says M. Sanjayan, executive vice president for Conservation International. “There are vast claims about people giving so much money after seeing VR. But those people might have given you the money anyway. I think a lot of people will make a very cool, very expensive VR experience that very few people will see.” Still, he’s jumping into the race, commissioning a film shot at a coral reef in Indonesia.


The Ryot office is in a former motorcycle repair shop. Brent Humphreys
R

Ryot is based in a former motorcycle repair shop. The front room contains a bar and a whiteboard outlining all the company’s current projects, from Lesbos to Uganda. On one wall is a bookshelf containing an Emmy Award and two decorative copies of Ulysses sandwiching the Quran. A group of editors and “stitchers,” who tie together the footage from the multiple lenses that make up a VR camera rig, sit at a bank of desktop computers. Ryot uses Adobe Creative Suite to edit and software by Kolor, VideoStitch, and PTGui to stitch, programs that are standard. Some VR companies, like Vrse and Condition One, build proprietary lenses and cameras; Mooser and Darg aren’t too interested in high-end hardware. “I don’t want to be in that game,” Mooser says. “The content side is the exciting place to be.”

It’s January 14, the night before Oscar nominations are announced, and Body Team 12, Ryot’s film about the Ebola crisis, is on the short list. Ryot shooters are preparing to head off to Mexico for a New York Times Magazine VR project, to Puerto Rico for a 2-D film about a boxer that will be shot on an iphoness, and to Iowa to embed with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Darg, Mooser, and I meet in a conference room that doubles as Mooser’s bedroom. He does much of the talking. The first thing he says is that the news is broken and cynical. The second thing he says is that he’s providing an alternative, which he calls the “halo” method. This involves social activism, 2-D films, blogs, live events, nonprofit fund-raising, and a lot of immersive, 360-degree video—virtual spaghetti thrown at a moving wall. But it’s clear that the money comes from VR. Ryot produces branded VR experiences for nonprofits and big companies. The nonprofits usually pay a discounted rate; the corporate clients pay up to $250,000.

Mooser says that the Oculus Rift does not interest him. “There are virtual reality experiences that are so good, but five or six thousand people will see them because the headsets aren’t available,” he says. “Tens of millions of people have watched our 360 videos on Facebook.” In one conversation he mentions that Elon Musk, Ian Somerhalder, Olivia Wilde, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Josh Brolin are friends.4 Mooser says he uses celebrity narrators to get NGO messages out; it’s another tool to meet the end goal. I suggest that the fetishization of celebrity has contributed to the media’s struggles.

“Fair enough,” Mooser says. “But if people are going to talk about the refugee crisis because Susan Sarandon was standing on the beach, let them. We’re not saying, ‘Look at this, Kim Kardashian is working with the refugees and here’s some sideboob!’”

Darg interjects: “Though that would work.”

Mooser excuses himself to return a call from the office of Samantha Power, US ambassador to the United Nations, who is apparently hoping to arrange a screening of refugee-related VR films. I walk through a hallway, past a cubby with mattress pads where staffers sometimes sleep, to a balcony overlooking the newsroom. It’s brick and poured concrete, covered in road signs from around the world. Indian, Puerto Rican, and British accents drift over a soundtrack of hip hop and anthemic folk. A long-haired guy rides around on a hoverboard.5 Applause rings out when he takes a bad spill.

The office has a distinct kind of energy—aggressively earnest collective effervescence, I’d call it. Before joining Ryot, Swenson, the CMO, worked for Global Philanthropy Group, a consultancy for wealthy people and celebrities. She tells me she joined Ryot because, upon meeting Mooser, she “realized Bryn would never fail at anything.” One VR editor says, “I’m a leader, and Bryn’s my leader,” then compares him to Gordon Ramsey, the celebrity chef.

The next morning, Body Team 12 is nominated for an Oscar and the office explodes in cheers. Billionaire Todd Wagner, a Ryot investor, calls Mooser to talk about the next round of investment. People from Pttow, which Mooser describes as “TED meets CES meets Burning Man,” give the Ryot team an award named after Nelson Mandela. Then the Huffington Post calls to discuss a deal that’s long been in the works—a buyout. Under the arrangement, which is finalized in April, AOL will own Ryot, but Mooser will retain editorial control. Ryot will dispatch 360-degree shooters in 15 countries to produce immersive stories, fulfilling, for the moment, its goal of becoming the world’s largest VR news network. “It’s an exciting day for us,” Darg later tells me, “and all the people we’re trying to help.”

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Let’s say the empathy machine works. Let’s say that, in two or 20 years, the privileged regularly transport themselves to disaster zones. We might feel more connection; we might feel compelled to ameliorate our virtually induced guilt by donating to aid groups, some of which are deserving and some of which are not.

One night in Lesbos, I ask Darg what aid efforts Operation Blessing is supporting on the island. (The organization has built schools in Haiti, earthquake-proof homes in Nepal, and water-purification facilities in Liberia, among other projects.) Darg mentions a solar-lamp distribution in the largest refugee camp on the island. We drive there, meeting an Aussie aid worker who wears a survival suit adorned with a 9/11 first responder patch. Operation Blessing has funded a few thousand solar lanterns—small hanging devices that light up the otherwise dismal interior of a tent. We’re joined by a photographer from the Hamptons who tells us with a little too much zeal about a riot that occurred in camp in the fall: “The whole place came unglued!” he says.

We walk past a wall adorned with graffiti that reads “No one is illegal.” People burn plastic wrapping in metal bins to keep warm; the choking smoke wafts through the camp. The woman in the survival suit knocks on the doors of shelters and hands out lanterns. “I like to go in with the kids and families because it’s fun,” she says, pausing to take selfies with the refugees. “I feel like Santa!” Darg films her at work for a series of videos to be shown on Operation Blessing’s website. A crowd of refugees demanding lanterns builds behind us, and we soon run out of the little lights. Thin young men drift away.

Wondering who is actually benefiting from this aid, I suggest to Darg that the lanterns could be distributed more efficiently. “It could be done better,” he says, “but her intentions are pure.”

He’s referring to the lantern distributor, but it strikes me that his analysis might also apply to his media company. Ryot’s worldview—that if we all put on empathy-enhancing headsets, experience celebrity-narrated VR, and donate to the aid-industrial complex or retweet a video, the world will heal—strikes me as kind, if naive. I look forward to seeing a VR film with the narrative punch of Body Team 12. But Ryot hasn’t figured out how to translate the storytelling skills it displays so well in its 2-D films to 360. Maybe Ryot will soon discover the magic blend of story, tone, and technical facility, but in the meantime it’s having a whole lot of fun producing content that’s pretty simple. Take The Nepal Quake Project. It’s viscerally affecting but contains little context or analysis or story and no characters. At the film’s end, the viewer is asked for money. Its good intentions don’t change the fact that the film is essentially immersive disaster porn, tailor-made for your iphoness.


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The research shows that VR can augment empathy—but it can’t necessarily create it outright.

Guy Martin / Panos

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In February, the United Nations hosts a panel in New York to discuss displaced refugees and invites Ryot to screen a VR film. Mooser and Darg are unable to attend, so they send two staffers to show a VR film about a Syrian refugee living in Jordan.

Across the globe, in Greece, Macedonia has just closed its border to Afghans, creating a dangerous backlog at the border. Two months later, Europe will begin shipping Syrians back to Turkey. At the UN, someone asks what the media can do to help, and one of the panelists says, “The opportunity to give a voice to refugees is unprecedented.”

The two Ryot staffers show the 360-degree film on an overhead projector. The refugee is a young lawyer, and the film, called For My Son, is a dignified, if slow, postcard from father to child. One of the Ryot staffers scrolls around on her laptop’s trackpad to simulate the 360-degree effect. Afterward a moderator encourages attendees to try the headset experience. When the panel ends, just five of 400-odd attendees approach. All appear to be under 35. A British photographer puts a headset on. “This is amazing,” she says. “It makes me want to puke a little bit. But it feels like you’re connecting more personally.” She stands to leave. “Maybe they’re hiring!”

I put on a headset and watch first the Jordan piece, then a montage that incorporates footage from war-torn Syria, a refugee camp on the Macedonia border, and our trip to Lesbos. The footage of arriving boats and cheering volunteers is familiar, but, lacking story and character, the experience feels touristic and abstract. Toward the end, a refugee stands over a young boy and says, in a moment of Struthers-esque awkwardness, “Look at this child. He is undernourished.” The film ends with a vista of the mountain of life jackets. I turn my head in all directions, listen to the virtual wind, and recall the most haunting element of that place: the smell.

Abe Streep (@abestreep) wrote about the disaster-rescue business in issue 23.08.

This article appears in the July 2016 issue.

1 Correction appended [1 pm, 7-13-2016]. David Darg has a reddish-brown beard, not red hair as an earlier version of this story stated.

2 Correction appended [1 pm, 7-13-2016]. An earlier version of this story improperly attributed a quote and expletive to David Darg.

3 Correction appended [1 pm, 7-13-2016]. Ryot is located near Venice, not in Venice.

4 Correction appended [1 pm, 7-13-2016]. Mooser mentioned Musk and other celebrities during an hour of conversation, not within a 10-minute span as previously indicated.

5 Correction appended [1 pm, 7-13-2016]. A person in Ryot’s office rode a hoverboard, not a Segway as previously stated.

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