How student journalists are using virtual reality to raise awareness of potential natural disasters

We've seen virtual reality take audiences to places they've never been and experience things they'd never get the chance to otherwise, but what if it could actually save lives by helping people to understand and prepare for the impact of inevitable natural disasters?

This is the question Robert Hernandez, professor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, wanted to find out when his class developed Hell and High Water VR, an experience that aims to prepare audiences for a coastal storm in Houston, Texas.

"The ability to take you to a place that allows you to look around is wonderful, but the ability to illustrate and give you a sense of scale is something that virtual reality can do better than anything else," he said.

"It's a known local story that Houston is incredibly vulnerable to hurricanes. They could cause an environmental and economic disaster, and potentially kill hundreds of people, so we used VR to give audiences a better sense of what is at stake."

The project, which is based on research by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune conducted in March, uses a mix of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and 360-degree video to offer viewers a range of videos which explain the history of the coastal storms in the area, and the scale of a potential disaster.

"A lot of folks in journalism are nervous about how it can be ethical when you can create the world in any way you want, you can make up anything you want in text or edit video in a weird way, but you don't, because we subscribe to ethics," Hernandez said.

"Those ethics don't go away with a new piece of technology like virtual reality, so I am hoping that this piece helps move the industry forward to how VR can be used."

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