King's College London

10a-10b. Prototype VR headset from Hunger in LA VR experience, 2012

These were used to show this piece when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012 and enabled “walk-around VR” for the first time. It was also around this time that de la Peña coined the term and inaugurated the medium of “immersive journalism”.

Using a mobile phone in a headset enabled the viewer to move around more freely and to be more responsive to the piece and the characters who they were engaging with. The headset, which showed the 12-minute piece, was built by a team at the University of Southern California including Mark Bolas, Palmer Luckey, Thai Phan, and Evan Suma. It was the first iteration of what would later become the Oculus Rift.