New project Asia’s Ailing Heritage aims to make interactive virtual reality more accessible

The latest project from the multimedia team at China Daily Asia explores five at risk heritage places in virtual reality, the team’s first foray into interactive 360-degree video storytelling.

The aims of Asia’s Ailing Heritage, launched on 24 April, were twofold. Working on the project gave the team the opportunity to learn how to film and produce virtual reality content, as well as create a 360-degree archive of heritage sites that might soon no longer exist, explained D J Clark, director of multimedia, China Daily Asia.

"We could bottle them up in a sense that if they were to get destroyed or something happened to them, we would have this historical record that would be more than just a load of photographs.

"So we thought it was an important subject and it lent itself well to VR."

The project, part of the Red-Letter series that previously explored AI interviews, tells the stories of five heritage sites that are at risk because of environmental forces or human activities, voiced by locals offering their own perspectives.

Clark was the executive producer on the project, working together with producer Marc Lajoie and four other team members familiar with video storytelling but new to virtual reality.

"Storytelling VR is actually quite simplistic because there isn’t a lot you can do, so the limitation in fact, in some ways, made things easier."

But the transition to a new type of storytelling, learning how to work with a new camera that requires journalists to hide from it when filming, was not the most challenging aspect.

The team also had to find out what was the best way to present virtual reality content to audiences in South East Asia, who have access to mobile phones but don’t have a quick internet connection, VR goggles, or in some cases the ability to download new apps.

"In our initial research, we were keen to try to bring down as many barriers as possible for our audience to engage with this," said Clark.

"We wanted it to be able to be something that could play easily on a phone anywhere, not dependant on a fast internet connection or having to download an app or download a load of information."

The team couldn’t find examples of similar interactive VR storytelling on the web, where viewers can dip in and out of storylines as they wish.

The majority of VR work available on the web is presented as single videos, explained Clark, so they had to program the interactive features from scratch, using "stare triggers".

The project also had to be set up in a way that made it easy to access from both mainland China and outside of the country, and is currently being promoted through China Daily’s network, including through full page ads in the newspaper.

“It was difficult technologically, and it was also a little bit difficult for the video producers to make that transition into 360,” said Clark.

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