What VR teaches us about reality – and what journalists and educators should do with VR
Science journalist Eva Wolfangel specializes in investigating the effects of future technologies on society by studying people who already make intensive use of these technologies today. She spent weeks under a VR headset researching social virtual reality and finally visited her new “virtual” friends in their real lives in Kuwait, Israel and various US states. This research taught her a lot about our misconception of reality. She researched what we can learn from these realities and what that means for future use cases of VR, especially when it comes to communication and journalism. In her opinion, journalists and communicators are too attached to the current genres and try to copy them into virtual reality, but these new realities have much more to offer. In this talk, Eva Wolfangel will be speaking about her research, her learnings, future use cases of VR for journalism and communication and her recent project: a journalistic social VR meeting and communication space.
Eva Wolfangel is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. In 2018, she was named European Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers. She focuses on new technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, computer science, data journalism, interaction between digital and real worlds, and space travel. Eva’s specialty is to combine creative writing and technical topics in order to reach a broad audience. She writes for major magazines and newspapers in Germany. As a VR journalist, she reports from virtual worlds as part of the journalistic cooperative RiffReporter.