CNN’s Experiment With Virtual Reality Doesn’t Go Well During Democratic
Hillary Clinton on CNN’s Democratic presidential debate on October. 13, 2015. As just about anyone could have predicted, the response was mixed. Today, the Gear VR is the only major virtual reality headset on the market.
But it’s possible to imagine a world where watching a debate in VR makes sense – and isn’t, as this debate was, limited to the small group of enthusiasts with a Gear VR. Individual reactions to the debate were completely impossible to read. Feeling the bright lights of the stage and hearing the crowd applaud all around you captures a real excitement that’s not there on a flat screen.
We’re coming up on a make-or-break year for virtual reality.
“If they’re doing a close-up on one candidate”, Roller says, “I could independently in VR could be looking at another candidate”. I’m talking about the things that lots of us already do during debates: texting, messaging, and tweeting.
Unlike voice or video, text complements the main event instead of drowning it out. I counted nine in one shot. The battery burned pretty quickly, but that didn’t really matter because it’s tough to use the headset for more than 30 or 40 minutes at a time anyway. I missed the real-time fact-checking a few publications do.
Perhaps the broadcast networks should give serious thought to giving Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, et al., their own reality show. What questions didn’t get asked?
“That’s as bad as it’s going to get”. Is watching the news in virtual reality supposed to mimic the view from a seat, or should you be free to roam?
I ate potato chips and honey-roasted peanuts for dinner last night. Part of the advantage of VR, of course, is that viewers can decide for themselves.
When CNN’s average TV viewers saw Clinton’s pearl earrings, all I saw was a blonde-haired blob on stage in a blue pantsuit. The idea behind the unit, which can be found for as low as , is to lower the barrier to entry to VR: rather than needing a ,000 PC to power the experience like you do with an Oculus Rift, Gear VR is instead powered by a Galaxy smartphone that’s plopped into the unit. He thinks that when it works right, virtual reality can combine the best of being there with the best of TV, in a single experience. Which brings me back to Nixon.
Primary debates aren’t just a chance to compare how would-be presidential hopefuls spar against each other; they also provide a snapshot of where each political party stands on the ideological spectrum as candidates vie for the love of base voters. Startups like NextVR and Jaunt want to stream stuff like soccer games or arena concerts, for which they could ultimately charge users a fee for accessing what’s hyped as the next best thing to getting an IRL front-row seat. So I figured, why not tune in? Maybe Anderson Cooper’s glasses can be encoded with subliminal Super PAC messaging guarded by black ICE.