Immersive Storytelling as a Useful Communication Tool for Humanitarian Aid Organizations

Within the field of PR, humanitarian aid nonprofit organizations have always been interested in engagement (Lovejoy et al. Reference Lovejoy, Waters and Saxton2012; Cho et al. Reference Cho, Schweickart and Haase2014) and they have seen in 360° video storytelling a timely and alternative way to connect with audiences and bring the social contexts where they work closer to the users (Nash Reference Nash2018; Soler-Adillon and Sora Reference Soler-Adillon and Sora2018; Fraustino et al. Reference Fraustino, Lee, Lee and Ahn2018). According to Irom (Reference Irom2018, 4269), “in recent years, virtual reality (VR) has gained traction in humanitarian communication through its utopian promises of copresence, experiential immediacy, and transcendence”. Humanitarian organizations started experimenting with 360° video and virtual reality technologies at the end of 2015, while media outlets from all over the world (Al Jazeera, The New York Times, British Broadcasting Corporation, Vice News, etc.) were trying to produce their first immersive content using spherical video (Doyle et al. Reference Doyle, Gelman and Gill2016), an effort many others have replicated.

A recurrent topic, especially among the European media and nonprofit organizations, is migration. Issues such as the Mediterranean migratory wave, armed conflicts like the Syrian Civil War or the implications of climate change are common topics in nonprofit organizations’ immersive productions (Nash Reference Nash2018; Irom Reference Irom2018; Pérez-Seijo and García-Orosa Reference Pérez-Seijo, García-Orosa, Vázquez-Herrero, Direito-Rebollal, Silva-Rodríguez and López-García2020). In the field of humanitarian communication, an example is Clouds over Sidra (2015), a documentary film about the Syrian refugee crisis produced by Chris Milk and Gabo Arora with the UN in partnership with Samsung.

The use of 360° video and virtual reality technologies to create news or non-fiction content is known as Immersive Journalism (De la Peña et al. Reference De la Peña, Weil, Llobera, Giannopoulos, Pomés, Spanlang, Friedman, Sánchez-Vives and Slater2010; Hardee Reference Hardee2016), described as “the production of news in a form in which people can gain first-person experiences of the events or situation described in news stories” (De la Peña et al. Reference De la Peña, Weil, Llobera, Giannopoulos, Pomés, Spanlang, Friedman, Sánchez-Vives and Slater2010: 291). A novel trend has arisen under distinct influences: video games’ logics and narratives (Domínguez Reference Domínguez2013), game thinking strategies (Longhi Reference Longhi2017; Domínguez Reference Domínguez2015), theatre, interactive documentary, and even film (Elmezeny et al. Reference Elmezeny, Edenhofer and Wimmer2018; Soler-Adillon and Sora Reference Soler-Adillon and Sora2018). As it is based on a remediation of practices (Soler-Adillon and Sora Reference Soler-Adillon and Sora2018), Immersive Journalism represents a good example of the current hybrid scenario that digital journalism is facing (Hamilton Reference Hamilton, Witschge, Anderson, Domingo and Hermida2016).

However, Immersive Journalism has been known by disparate, even in accurate names such as VR Journalism (Owen et al. Reference Owen, Pitt, Aronson-Rath and Milward2015; Sirkkunen et al. Reference Sirkkunen, Väätäjä, Uskali and Rezaei2016), 360° storytelling (Elmezeny et al. Reference Elmezeny, Edenhofer and Wimmer2018), or 360° video journalism (Van Damme et al. Reference Van Damme, All, De Marez and Van Leuven2019), which reflects the common confusion on what authors and journalists understand by virtual reality and 360° video.

Since the media are also improperly labelling spherical videos as VR experiences (Smith Reference Smith2015), it is necessary to differentiate between VR journalism and 360° video journalism, though both are major types of Immersive Journalism. The first consists of the production of content through 3D computer-generated imagery (CGI), often based on factual evidence, and it has been driven by Nonny De la Peña and its VR company Emblematic Group with works such Hunger in L.A. (2012) or Kiya (2015). Nonetheless, 360° video journalism or storytelling is more widespread (Hardee and McMahan Reference Hardee and McMahan2017), tends to consist of real image videos with less interactivity and agency (Domínguez Reference Domínguez2017) but is faster and less expensive to produce than truly VR experiences (Pérez-Seijo and López-García Reference Pérez-Seijo, López-García and López Paredes2018).

The popularization of what are also known as spherical videos for news production was primarily due to Facebook and YouTube. In 2015, both democratised access to such content by allowing the free upload of 360° videos on their social platforms, which helped news outlets, nonprofit organizations and other producers to almost eliminate or reduce distribution costs (Watson Reference Watson2017; Mabrook and Singer Reference Mabrook and Singer2019). Furthermore, it facilitated users’ access to and viewing of 360° videos, reaching a larger audience as viewers do not always need a virtual reality headset to watch the content on Facebook and YouTube, since both platforms allow mobile (by tilting a smartphone or tablet) and web browser consumption (Watson Reference Watson2017; Pillai et al. Reference Pillai, Ismail and Charles2017; Herranz et al. Reference Herranz, Caerols and Sidorenko2019).

The hallmark of this novel digital trend is that, for the first time, users can cross the screen while watching 360° videos or VR experiences wearing a virtual reality headset (Domínguez Reference Domínguez2013), leading to a first-person experience of what is shown and told in the news story (De la Peña et al. Reference De la Peña, Weil, Llobera, Giannopoulos, Pomés, Spanlang, Friedman, Sánchez-Vives and Slater2010; Benítez and Herrera Reference Benítez, Herrera, de Lara and Arias2017). Additionally, when the users perceive the other reality (the virtual world) to be more engaging than their own physical reality, they are experiencing what is called presence (Slater and Wilbur Reference Slater and Wilbur1997, 4). Presence here means the perceptual illusion of no-mediation (Lombard and Ditton Reference Lombard and Ditton1997) experienced by a user in a mediated environment which, as a result, leads to the feeling of “being there”, in the other or other’s reality (Slater and Wilbur Reference Slater and Wilbur1997; Ijsselsteijn and Riva Reference Ijsselsteijn, Riva, Riva, Davide and Ijsselsteijn2003; Slater and Sanchez-Vives Reference Slater and Sanchez-Vives2016), in the virtual environment, despite the user’s physical presence in another reality, that is, his or her everyday reality (Witmer and Singer Reference Witmer and Singer1998, 225).

Per Suh et al. (Reference Suh, Wang, Gu, Wagner, Schmorrow and Fidopiastis2018), the use of VR headsets leads to higher levels of sense of presence, which in turn increases audience engagement. Nevertheless, Shin and Biocca (Reference Shin and Biocca2017: 2802) suggest that “immersive or drooling interfaces do not, as the journalism industry claims, necessarily enhance the sense of engagement or satisfaction”, or even empathy (Bindman et al. Reference Bindman, Castaneda, Scanlon and Cechony2018). In this regard, the results of the study conducted by Bindman et al. (Reference Bindman, Castaneda, Scanlon and Cechony2018: 8) show that “strong use of narrative techniques may be most important to make viewers understand their role and feel a part of the story”.

Virtual reality headsets allow users to cross the screen and to be immersed in the scene, becoming a passive visitor or a simulated witness. The image surrounds the users so they “can turn in any direction while a fixed, linear story unfolds around them” (Elmezeny et al. Reference Elmezeny, Edenhofer and Wimmer2018, 2). Immersive journalism presents new challenges, because “when journalists decide to invite audiences to witness a news event ‘as if they were there’” they are, in fact, acquiring “new responsibilities towards audiences” (Sánchez Laws and Utne Reference Sánchez Laws and Utne2019: 1). The first-person experience coupled with the “as if I was there” feeling experienced by users prompts reflection on the conventional concept of the viewer and leads to the consideration of users as immersive witnesses on the scene: “immersive media reality potentially enables witnessing because of its capacity to give us a sense of embodied presence in the context of a violation, crisis or human rights context” (Gregory Reference Gregory2016). The possibility of “being there” (De la Peña et al. Reference De la Peña, Weil, Llobera, Giannopoulos, Pomés, Spanlang, Friedman, Sánchez-Vives and Slater2010), surrounded by the image, represents the paradigmatic case of witnessing (Peters Reference Peters, Frosh and Pinchevski2011, 38). However, this transportation to the other’s reality is simulated and mediated by technology, a virtual reality headset.

Nonetheless, this kind of immersive witnessing “links the experience of VR with a moral attitude of responsibility for distant others” (Nash Reference Nash2018, 1). Such immersive storytelling can bring closer a particular social reality through a simulated journey to the narrative world, a first-person experience that enables users to walk in someone else’s shoes. Consequently, some suppose this helps to create more empathetic bonds between the user and the distant other (Soler-Adillon and Sora Reference Soler-Adillon and Sora2018; Hardee Reference Hardee2016).

Some claim that the use of virtual reality and 360° video to create stories enhances empathy, so a stronger link with the distant other or reality could be generated (Milk Reference Milk2015; Kool Reference Kool2016; Sánchez Laws Reference Sánchez Laws2017 Archer and Finger Reference Archer and Finger2018). But Van Damme et al. (Reference Van Damme, All, De Marez and Van Leuven2019, 1) conducted an experimental study on distant suffering and found that while place illusion and enjoyment were higher in 360° videos, no significant evidence of greater involvement with the distant other were found. On the other hand, Suh et al. (Reference Suh, Wang, Gu, Wagner, Schmorrow and Fidopiastis2018, 437) found “that audience engagement is mainly determined by the audience’s degree of presence while viewing a 360° video”. Still, picture quality could interfere (Shin and Biocca Reference Shin and Biocca2017, 2817).

On the other hand, an experimental study about disaster communication and spatial presence found that “360° video featuring the aftermath of a natural disaster yields enhanced attitudes towards the helpful impact of the content”(Fraustino et al. Reference Fraustino, Lee, Lee and Ahn2018, 331). In this regard, another study shows that “VR formats prompted a higher empathetic response than static photo/text treatments and a higher likelihood of participants to take ‘political or social action’ after viewing” (Archer and Finger Reference Archer and Finger2018). Moreover, Yoo and Drumwright (Reference Yoo and Drumwright2018) carried out an experiment with users using a 360° video about a Syrian refugee camp as a stimulus and discovered that viewers wearing a VR headset experienced greater levels of donation intention, vividness, interactivity and social presence than the tablet users.

The main aim of this paper is to examine how and why nonprofit organizations are integrating 360° video storytelling into their communication strategies. Thus, the following research questions are posed:

• RQ1: To what extent do European humanitarian organizations use 360° videos as a tool to tell stories and bring the realities where they work or advocate closer to the users and to drive engagement?

• RQ2: What are the main topics and purposes behind each production (explore a place, witness an event, listen to a victim, etc.)?

• RQ3: How and through which elements (audio recordings, graphics, headers and other audio or visual aids) is the multimedia narrative reinforced in the 360° videos published by NGOs?

• RQ4: Through which platforms do the humanitarian organizations disseminate this kind of content?

• RQ5: To what extent do the 360° videos include options for engagement?

Volume: How Many Videos have Humanitarian Organizations Published?

The first two videos found are dated 2 December 2015 and were published by WWF on Facebook and YouTube (Amazon! and Kingdom of Forests, respectively). As of April 2019, the endpoint of the data collection, the humanitarian organizations of the sample had produced and published several productions. Although the 2019 data are not complete, it is clear that from 2015 to 2016 there was a significant increase in 360° content production. This rise demonstrates the interest of humanitarian organizations in experimenting with this nascent form of immersive storytelling (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

360° videos published by humanitarian organizations per year (from 2015 to April 2019).

Source: authors’ compilation

The results show that humanitarian organizations published the greatest number of 360° videos in 2016 and 2018 (respectively, 37.8% and 37.8%). However, it should be noted that nine of the productions published in 2018 are part of Stories After Syria, a project led by WVI in partnership with Contrast VR, Al Jazeera’s virtual reality studio. These 360° short documentaries were written, directed and filmed by seven displaced children in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp.

Stories: Migration as the Main Interest

Humanitarian organizations aim to show audiences the realities where they work to encourage people to support their social causes. In this regard, in most of the 360° video productions analysed in this study, migration was the major topic (75.7%), migrants being understood as displaced people or refugees, as seen in productions such as Mediterranean Rescue Operation, Ali’s Story or We Are Rohingya. In the sample, climate change is present only in 10.8% and wildlife in 5.4%. Terrorist attacks (Multiple Casualty Incident), hunger (Crisis in Borno State) and arranged marriage (The View from The Mountain) are hardly addressed at all (2.7% in each case).

Relation Between Volume and Topics

We have crossed the variable year with the variable topic to figure out if there was any relation between the moment of publication and the issue (Fig. 2). Migration was the main topic of interest especially in 2016 and 2018, but also in 2017. The volume of 360° videos that address migration in 2016 (35.1% of the sample) can be understood by referring to the social context. The European migrant crisis started in 2015, and the foray into immersive content began in earnest at the end of that year and beginning of 2016 (Doyle et al. Reference Doyle, Gelman and Gill2016; Pérez-Seijo and López-García Reference Pérez-Seijo, López-García and López Paredes2018).

Except for 2015, when it was the only issue covered in spherical videos, climate change was rarely addressed. The videos that do address it were produced by the WWF. Three years later, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies would go on to publish Shukman’s House, a spherical video about the rise of heat in Hong Kong, possibly linked to climate change. The interest in animal life starts in 2018 and continues in 2019 with WWF.

Fig. 2

Overview of the evolution of topics by year, from 2015 to 1 April 2019.

Source: authors’ compilation

The Purpose Behind the 360° Videos

We also examined the purpose of each immersive production in an attempt to better understand the perspective adopted to convey each story. Finally, we found that the main aim of more than half of the productions is to show a migrant reality (59.5%) to create social awareness. As we have observed, such productions are mostly documentary-style and thus present a more developed storytelling compared to the remaining categories. Through this kind of content, NGOs aim to bring distant migrant realities closer to the user to raise awareness and to boost donation intention. Some examples are We Are Rohingya by MSF and Life in the time of Refuge by UNHCR, among others.

The next most common major purpose of the storytelling (or the videos when storytelling is absent) is to observe an environment or scenario (24.3%) enabling users to explore freely in an evolving scene (what we have called “show simple” in Fig. 3), e.g. Mediterranean Rescue Operation by IFCR or in Elephant Gets Up After Successful Collaring in Anti-Poaching Effort published by WWF.

Fig. 3

Purpose of each 360° video story.

Source: authors’ compilation

The remaining immersive productions sought deliberately to: denounce facts or events (8.1%), e.g. the forced marriage of underage girls through the 360° video film The View from the Mountain by WVI; to show in context (2.7%) how, for example, researchers collect biopsies of skin from whales in the WWF-produced documentary Pelagos; to simulate a situation (2.7%), as in Multiple Casualty Incident, in order to train MSF’s staff for example; and to allow users to visit remote locations (2.7%), as in WWF’s Kingdom of Forests, so as to understand the role of the Amazon in the Earth’s climate stability.

Who and How: Form, Genre and Storyteller

The vast majority of the videos (94.6%) consist entirely of real images. That is, while some productions include graphics or superimposed images, they include neither hybrid (combination of virtual reality and real-image footage) nor totally synthetic scenes. The remaining 5.4% are hybrid productions: on the one hand, We Are Rohingya (Médecins Sans Frontières 2018) includes a synthetic scene with a map that illustrates the displacement of the Rohingya people fleeing from Myanmar’s military repression; on the other hand, some scenes of Dreaming In Za’atari (from the project Stories after Syria by WVI and Contrast VR 2018) incorporate animated objects to illustrate the hopes, dreams and aspirations of each of the seven refugee children who appear in the documentary. Figure 4 shows both examples.

Fig. 4

Videos with synthetic elements.

Source: screenshot of We Are Rohingya (MSF’s Facebook) and Dreaming in Za’atari (WVI’s YouTube)

In terms of genre, 56.7% fall within a traditional one: 48.6% are documentary-style, e.g. Ali’s story by WVI, and only 8.1% are 360° video reports, e.g. Step inside a Rohingya Tent Kutupalong Refugee Camp by UNHCR. The remaining productions do not fit in any conventional genres, so we have created some categories to better understand their format based on existing proposals such as those by Jones (Reference Jones2017) and Watson (Reference Watson2017). The most common are simple videos, i.e. with a basic narrative design, conceived to be distributed on social platforms like Facebook and YouTube (29.7% of the total sample, e.g. Mediterranean Rescue Operation by IFCR, which Jones called “social 360” and Watson refers to as “short-form 360” videos. Such videos lack a human narrator (sometimes text serves as a guide within the story), and thus emphasise seeing a specific reality through one’s own eyes; consequently, information and real testimonies take a back seat to exploration.

The narrative form of the other videos does not fit in the features of the aforementioned genres since 5.4% have been self-labelled as virtual reality films, such as Life in the Time of Refuge by the UNCHR and The View from the Mountain by WVI. The remaining 8.1%, which we have referred to as “others”, are composed of WWF’s short video preview of a longer immersive piece about the Amazon, a Save the Children’s donation campaign titled On Board Our Life-Saving Ship and a Doctors Without Borders’ real-image simulation called Multiple Casualty Incident, part of a training course for MSF medics and logisticians that simulates a multiple casualty incident.

On the other hand, over half of the productions have a human storyteller (51.4%), six of which are told by a minor simultaneously adopting the role of storyteller and source. We point out the human feature because 5.4% of the videos use text to narrate and guide users through the story, as a real storyteller would do. The narrator is a male voice in 57.9% of videos with a human storyteller, a female in 36.8%, and in 5.3% both male and female voices narrate the story.

Within the function of storyteller, we have distinguished diverse and concrete roles. In this sense, almost 70% of the videos with a human storyteller are narrated by a major source, whereas the role is assumed by a journalist or a staff member as narrator in just 26%. Only Doctors without borders’ real-image simulation Multiple Casualty Incident are narrated by a fictional character. Thus, we have noticed producers tend to focus on the characters of the stories they want to share, giving them a voice and erasing the figure of the professional as an intermediary to bring the user closer to the other’s reality through the other’s voice.

Interactivity and Engagement Attempts

In terms of user roles, the results show that the viewer enters the scene or story’s world without a body in 97.3% of the 360° productions analysed. That is, they are present without a physical or virtual (avatar) body in the scene. Such is the case in South Sudan: Forced to Live in Chaos and Poverty and Shukman’s House. Therefore, only in Multiple Casualty Incident, a real-image simulation that allows the viewer to walk in another’s shoes, do viewers assume a specific identity, that of a male victim of war.

Per the literature, immersive journalism generally and 360° video storytelling specifically aim for users to feel “as if they were there”, in the story’s world, thereby gaining a first-person experience of the events. As such, we wanted to determine the number of productions in which users themselves are detected by the characters in the scene, in a simulated fashion, of course. It turns out they can be detected (whether or not they have a visual body in the scene) by the in-scene characters in 35% of the immersive stories (e.g. We Fled a War, Then We Nearly Drowned by MSF), whereas they are completely undetectable (invisible) in about 48% (e.g. On Board Our Life-Saving Ship by Save the Children), and 16% of films lack a unified criterion for measurement (e.g. Nisreen’s Story After Syria by WVI).

The results are positive if we understand immersive storytelling’s main goal as encouraging the user to feel like he/she is part of the story, in an attempt to create or reinforce the emotional bond between the viewing public and the others or their realities. To that end, simulating users’ visibility is a possible tactic, though not without ethical risk as simulating the user’s visibility requires staging, especially when the main characters are real sources and not actors playing a role as in Multiple Casualty Incident.

The results allow us to identify three main user roles. First, there is the “user- protagonist,” when the user takes on a major role in the story and therefore adopts a specific identity within the story and stops being him or herself during the experience in order to discover and see the other’s world through the other’s eyes, such as in the aforementioned real-image simulation Multiple Casualty Incident published by MSF.

Furthermore, we can distinguish two separate roles when users enter the scene as themselves, that is, without losing their identity within the story and watching the world from their own point of view. First, it is possible to identify a passive observer when the user discovers the world through his or her eyes but is not visible to the sources or storytellers, e.g. as in Kingdom of Forests by WWF. Secondly, a user becomes a “witness” when she or he observes the reality in first person and all or some of the virtual characters detect the user’s presence in the scene, through a face to face encounter to boost copresence (with storytellers, 32.4% of videos; with sources, 21.6%), gazes (storyteller, 21.6%; sources, 13.5%) or even direct references to the user (storyteller, 21.6%). Some examples of this last category are Life in the Time of Refuge by UNHCR and We Are Rohingya by MSF, among others.

Surprisingly, the analysis shows that interactivity is non-existent. None of the productions allows for interactive navigation or the selections of basic options such as play, stop or click to discover further information. This feature is more common in app-based content, which frequently incorporates designs strongly influenced by video game logic.

In sum, for the possibility for agency is limited to the main feature of spherical videos, namely the 360° view. Whereas some authors refer to the option to change view points as an interactive feature, we prefer the term agency as a quality inherent to 360° videos.

Circulation of 360° Video Productions

Regarding dissemination, most humanitarian organizations in the sample choose YouTube as their primary means of publishing 360° video productions (54.1% YouTube only), whereas Facebook lags behind (18.9% Facebook only), as shown in Fig. 5. The organizations tend not to publish their immersive content on their websites, with the exception of some posts published by WVI. In sum, humanitarian organizations prioritise social networks over the web to reach and connect with audiences, perhaps with a view to going viral. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the data on views reveal that 360° videos reach more people on Facebook than on YouTube, even though Facebook only allows mobile or web browser viewing as its media player doesn’t work for virtual reality headsets (see “Appendix 3”).

Fig. 5

Distribution platforms.

Source: authors’ compilation

Reinforcing Multimedia: Audio, Visuals and Text

Slightly more than half of the videos published by these humanitarian organizations use music to complement the stories (Table 3). More than a third (35.1%) of the sample maintain the music from beginning to end, while 16.2% use it only in certain moments. Instrumental music is the preferred option in 45.9% of the sample, whereas songs (with lyrics or at least voice) and vocal music are barely used (2.7% in both cases). The song included in We Left Home Empty-Handed, by MSF, is performed by displaced Children from South Sudan who sing that this world “is not a home, it’s a place for evils”. On the other hand, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, by MSF too, users can hear what seems to be a religious chant.

Table 3

Modalities

Modalities	N	%
Audio
Music	19	51.4
Music from beginning to end	13	35.1
Music at specific moments	6	16.2
Instrumental music	1	2.7
Vocal music	1	2.7
Voice dubbing	8	21.6
Sound effects	2	5.4
Visual
Image effects	2	5. 4
Visuals overlaid	24	64.9
Lower third graphics	11	29.7
Subtitles	11	29.7
Videos	2	5.4
Image/photographs	–	–
Credits	1	2.7
Titles	8	21.6
Additional text	6	16.2
Othera	15	40.5

Bold indicates that these items are the main subcategories

^aDisparate elements, such as logos and figures to hide faces, instructions and so on

Music is a powerful tool to convey emotions, but also to introduce editorial bias. As the goal of nonprofit organization’ communication is to raise funds, it is understood that they include music on some of their videos in order to enhance empathy and trigger emotions towards the social message to elicit donations.

The application of sound effects is confined to particular cases. In Multiple Casualty Incident, they are used to simulate a heartbeat and a beep. Given the video is a real-image simulation, no ethical issues arise in the use of these effects. On the other hand, Life in the Time of Refuge, a VR film as labelled by its producers, includes a specific sound to notify users when an infographic appears on the scene. Therefore, in this case, the aim of introducing sound effects is to direct the user’s attention in an omnidirectional environment, where the possibilities of missing important information are high if the viewer does not properly explore the scene. Last but not least, it should be noted that 21.6% of the cases involve voice dubbing, mostly from Arabic (the characters’ native language) to English.

Regarding visuals, the results obtained are more complex since almost 65% of the videos include superimposed visuals and text elements. Lower third graphics and subtitles are the most frequent overlays used (29.7% in each case), followed by the titles of the productions (21.6%) and other basic text elements (16.2%) that provide further information or identify objects, places or even people. Compared to traditional videos, the observed use of these modalities is not innovative.