1906 ATLANTA RACE MASSACRE is a phone-based AR experience directed by Nonny de la Peña that digs into the forgotten history of the violent attacks on the black community by white mobs incited by race-baiting politicians and newspapers. The arc of the story is told through the lens of black journalist Max Barber, who was chronicling the events as they were unfolding. We see a series of volumetrically captured monologues by Barber (played by actor Bryonn Bain). As the massacre unfolds, we travel to different key locations around Atlanta represented by spatial facades and Quill illustrations. There’s also a series of 2D AI animations ranging from white politicians in newspapers to black activists who are in picture frames. I spoke with de la Peña around some of the constraints and limitations of working with mobile phones that are not completely optimized for XR experiences like this just yet, but it’s much more accessible form factor that the executive producer of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights is interested getting into schools.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different immersive stories from South by Southwest 2025, And I'm also looking into, in this section, some of the different politically themed episodes that are talking around either the world around us right now or looking back in the past. In this particular episode of 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre by Nani de la Pena, this is looking back at this event that happened in Atlanta, Georgia, back in 1906, where there was a lot of race baiting from these people. Politicians and the newspapers were putting out all of these hyperbolic reports that ended up having this white mob incited into violence and violently attacking a number of black people across the community of Atlanta. So there is a journalist named Max Barber who is actually recording and documenting all these things at the time. And so the piece is structured over some of the observations and reporting from Max Barber as you're progressively going through history. the chronology of this event as it's unfolding over time. And you're seeing a map of where these different key locations are. And then you're transported into these locations. You receive a monologue from Max, who is volumetrically captured by this actor named Byron Bain. And they've also got some cool animations and some 3D models of these buildings. And this is all happening on a mobile AR phone as you're looking into these portals, into these stories and these little vignettes as you're progressing through each of the chapters and going up into the chronology of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Nani happened on Tuesday, March 11th, 2025 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:14.463] Nonny de la Peña: Yeah, I'm Nonny de la Piña, and I'm best known for having founded Emblematic Group and introducing immersive content, particularly immersive journalism, to a lot of different festivals, including being the first VR piece at Sundance, Tribeca, World Economic Forum. But more recently, I took on a new hat to open a center in downtown Los Angeles for Arizona State University. So I run a graduate program, we do events, something called narrative and emerging media. So you can get a degree with me now.
[00:02:47.827] Kent Bye: Awesome. And so maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:53.433] Nonny de la Peña: So I started out as a print journalist. I was a correspondent for Newsweek back when there was a print magazine coming to people's mailboxes. Then I went on to make doc films, ended up in a backwards way writing stuff on TV shows. None of it scratched my itch. And eventually I built, along with a digital artist named Peggy Weil, a virtual Guantanamo Bay prison because I felt like the story was really off limits and, you know, out of sight, out of mind. and I wanted to make it more visible and available and we built that in Second Life in 2007. And then later on I taught myself, not long after, I taught myself to code in Unity and began making full immersive pieces. At that point we had to 3D print our own headsets and basically that's how Emblematic started.
[00:03:40.037] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I know that we've had a number of opportunities to connect over the years, including back at Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference 2014 when I was first starting the Voices of VR podcast. And so I think you were episode number four or five. But yeah, so you've been a longtime innovator in this space. And so this year at South by Southwest, you have an augmented reality piece. And so maybe you could give a bit more context for how this piece came about.
[00:04:02.475] Nonny de la Peña: So this piece was an interesting commission by the Arthur M. Blank Foundation where one of the funders saw me speak and put me in touch with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. They were working on a whole thing on remembrance and ended up focusing on the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, which was an event that predated Black Wall Street. A lot of people now know about Black Wall Street and what happened in Oklahoma. But in this case, it was three or four days, a white rampage against black members of all levels of Atlanta society, from the boot blacks to the presidents of the universities. And the goal of the piece was, how can we deliver it to schools? And so I had to forego a headset. And doing story in augmented reality is challenging, challenging, challenging. Phones, iPads, they're just not quite designed for immersive content completely yet.
[00:05:09.167] Kent Bye: Great. And so maybe you could walk through your process for, this is a really big story with lots of different chapters. And so you have a multi-chapter experience. You're blending together lots of different technologies from volumetric capture to some quill illustration and some 2D elements that are also these interstitials. And so yeah, as you were starting to think about how to structure the story, where did you begin with the research and starting to try to piece together how you were going to translate this really big story into the chronology of different moments that are happening throughout this massacre and picking these moments to then translate these into the spatial context because we're going into these different locations to seeing how the build up to this event is happening across all of these different locations across Atlanta. So love to hear how you started to tackle that as a narrative problem.
[00:06:02.995] Nonny de la Peña: So the first part of it was just the hardcore research of trying to figure out how to crack the nut of telling truth without trauma. And I had certainly a lot of help with people and in discussions. Ended up looping in Alton Glass, another very talented director, and Aretha Hill, a journalist at ASU. But Alton in particular is from Atlanta, but he'd never heard about the massacre. So until I brought him onto the project, this is a really buried history, buried truth. So the first step was really like, you know, the details are just abhorrent. Taking that all into your body and trying to be the filter to an audience was hard enough. And then one of my colleagues also working on the whole 1906 effort to bring it back into being and make people understand what had happened was a guy running the Georgia Cold Case Project, Hank Klibanoff out of Emory University. And he was having his students write papers about different aspects of the riot as a class project. And one of the papers was written by a young woman who now, believe it or not, is in Austin going to journalism school here. And she focused on this character, Max Barber. who was an editor of something called Voice of the Negro. And this was a very robust and popular magazine in 1906, 20,000 subscribers. It was really significant and very erudite. He was a guy who was a son of a slave and he spoke Latin and quotes Shakespeare and really amazing, brilliant guy, Max Barber. And he had written a postscript, a pamphlet, about what had happened to try to beg the world to pay attention to what really had gone on. And that was that, much like our January 6th event here in the United States, there was a lot of race baiting by the press. you know, claiming that burly black brutes rape white women, which was false count. One of the owners of the newspaper was running for governor, very deeply embedded with the newspapers, and they were using that to get the white vote out and have him win for governor. And it was effective and it worked. But it also led to this evening where the newspapers, you know, we think of like, oh, the newspapers only come out once a day or whatever, very rare. But in those days, you'd have lots of extras. So it'd be like getting an update on your phone the way you would get on News Now. And the extras were basically all day long fanning the flames. Another rape, another brutality, another da-da. And people at the end of the day just went absolutely ballistic and turned their rage on. this white crowd onto any and every black person they could see on the city streets and then continued to go into other neighborhoods.
[00:08:47.444] Kent Bye: And so in this piece, there's these newspaper headlines and there's also, you referenced some of the Max Barr reporting that was done on this issue at the time. Did you find like a book that someone had written that has this or did you find yourself having to go and do a lot of original research to piece this story together? Maybe you could elaborate on the process of finding And it also sounds like at the same time that the mainstream newspaper was putting forth like a not so true story about everything that was happening. So you have to kind of find the alternative history. And so I'm just curious what that process was for you to either find a scholar that had already researched all that or if that was some original research that you had to do to kind of piece the structure of the story together.
[00:09:30.094] Nonny de la Peña: So there are a number of books, et cetera, about this event. Rage in the Gate City was a good one. There are a number of stories about the Atlanta Race Massacre that have been published as both papers, books, et cetera. But Max Barber is a very unknown character. Historically, there's no biography about him. So once I got some idea about Max Barber, then I had to go deep, deep, deep into primary source research. So finding his papers at Wesleyan. And because I got so focused on them, The team in around the 1906, particularly led by Hank Klibanoff, found his great nephew living in Philadelphia, where, by the way, Max Barber got run out of town when he tried to tell the truth and ended up the only job he could get. Well, he went back to school and became a dentist and became a very well-to-do man in Philadelphia. But he helped start the NAACP. He did a lot of work still. So running into his nephew had his papers. So now Max Barber's work, based on pushing the interests around Max Barber, has all of his papers, has all been donated to Emory University. So Max Barber has now been kind of legitimized through this process. But it did require me to find all these original writing and utilize it to frame the language. Most of what you hear is a dialogue that's performed by an actor, a monologue. And it's actually word for word for what Max Barber wrote. Occasionally I had to rewrite a few pieces just to kind of keep the story flowing. But the vast majority of the words came straight from Max Barber's writings.
[00:11:05.724] Kent Bye: Maybe you could explain a little bit again, like what role Max Barber was doing at that time. Was he a journalist or how is he bearing witness to everything?
[00:11:14.677] Nonny de la Peña: So Max Barber was the editor of something called Voice of the Negro. So he was a journalist and he was covering the events. And after things really blew up, and he was probably even present and maybe possibly witnessing some of the stuff that went on, he certainly was in that community. But once things were so crazy, nobody would go to work. And basically Atlanta came to a standstill because the black population was such an important part of pretty much every job in the city. So the mayor, et cetera, had to kind of try to get people back to work. And they held like a group meeting with the civic leaders, et cetera, and which they tried to blame it on, you know, people, drunken black people at bars, you know, dives, so-called dives. They turned it on the black community as having been violent and, you know, further perpetuating the misinformation that was being driven by these editions of newspapers who are promoting the governor's race. So Max Barber secretly sent off an anonymous memo to a telegram to the papers in New York City to tell them what had really happened and what had really transpired. And when local officials, somebody turned him in from the telegraph office, and when local officials found out, they basically ran him out of town or threatened to put him in prison. And he had to leave Atlanta permanently because he wanted to speak out. But that never stopped him from continuing his fight for the rights of black folk that had been so sorely abused, if I can use his words, in this event.
[00:12:44.466] Kent Bye: And so in the structure of the piece, it seems like it's a chronology that's leading up to these series of events that are happening. But also there's like monologue sequence where you get a little bit of context, but then there's a interactive rubbing off the map. And then you have a map of Atlanta and you're going to these different places around the town. And then there's... teleportation into that place and so you see a spatial context of these different locations come down and then a little bit more of that narrative context and so there seemed to be like a little bit of a rhythm and a loop for how you were progressing through each of these different chapters and so wondering if you could elaborate on designing the journey through these different places and how you wanted to unfold the story in this chronology.
[00:13:26.803] Nonny de la Peña: So the first problem is, right, as I said earlier, the truth without trauma. And trying to tell this very important story, but also telling it through the limitations of a phone or an iPad, so you could have bigger distribution and could actually end up in schools and have a distribution in schools and really try to make this hidden history become a legitimate part of curriculum. But that started with the challenges of the illustrations. We tried to use quill, but the phone just really hated quill. And when you make big quill art, there are lots of lines. And if you just happen to look a little way, all you're feeling like you're seeing is scribbling. So I had to rethink what that meant. And I also wanted people to maybe be standing on the map and walking around. Those were a couple of things we were working with where the quill might have worked better. But because it became more and more important for this to be in a classroom, then you don't have the walk-around space. You have students in their desks. So that also constrained some of the decision-making of how to do the work and the art. So the combination of limited processing power of the phone and this need to have anyone sitting down to experience it if they need to. You can move around, and that's still a possibility, but the idea that you could just... to have some interactivity at your desk so that you can continue to participate. This happened in such a large part of the city, right? It happened in various locations. And that was also an issue to try to address. How do we get people to know which street corners? And originally, this was going to really be only Atlanta-based. So the idea was by identifying these street corners, it would be a lot easier for people to recognize where these events were transpiring. But as we got further from just the idea of it being only distributed in Atlanta, then it really became more about making that larger map and letting you participate. There are some things I would like to finish with it, like I think those little patches that you wipe off and you touch, you should have to put them on the map so you can see where they go. And then you'd build up the structure of where in the city this was all happening.
[00:15:25.874] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so maybe you could talk about the scriptwriting process and monologues that you have. And it sounds like you were collaborating with Alton Glass. Yeah, I'd just love to hear any other further elaboration on the process of coming up with these monologues to tell the story that you're telling.
[00:15:41.348] Nonny de la Peña: Yeah, so the initial part of it also, I brought in Eater's Booster, but they were just really too busy. So they just really couldn't quite participate in the way that I would have liked and his team. But throughout, I was doing checks on the script, right? So Alton would come in and he offered me a note to come back. Also a really busy guy, but come back and get the script done. But the other thing that happened was, of course, in the middle of making it was COVID. So that disrupted the process. And then the next big disruption I had was I had a fire, right? And so, so much of my process got disrupted by the fire. And I had a lot of my material burned. So I had to rejigger a lot of that. So this was really a tough journey for this piece. However, once we got the script and Breon Bain, who's the lead actor, and I could work on his performance and riff back and forth, and then I had Gina Belafonte come and help me not only cast Breon, but also help cast other folks. Then the magic started really happening. Brion is just incredibly talented. And being filmed in a tiny little container, you know, that's the Digital Nation Entertainment. It's really a mantis vision system in this tiny little container. And, you know, where I had to direct him from outside the container only worked because of the way that we were able to go back and forth ahead of time and really work together and make the script sound right and... have it come out of his mouth in a way that felt real.
[00:17:16.112] Kent Bye: When he's in this container, is he able to look at you and do his performance, or is he basically performing to avoid space?
[00:17:23.530] Nonny de la Peña: Yeah, he can't look at me. There's no way, right? He has to pretend. And there's nothing there but these bright lights around him and 120 cameras staring at him from every angle. And he has to somehow find himself in that space and plead to people. And really, his performance is remarkable. I think this easily could become a theater piece that Brienne could carry. And I would really love to see that actually happen.
[00:17:51.139] Kent Bye: In terms of file sizes for all this stuff, it seems like it's working with the phone. Maybe you could just talk about all the different constraints as you look at going from where you're used to working from VR-based projects, sometimes PC VR where you don't have to worry as much, and then Quest is another constraint that you have to have, but translating into just all this phone-based stuff.
[00:18:12.458] Nonny de la Peña: Yeah. I did a Lyme disease project that was all on the Quest. And that certainly had a lot of optimization challenges. But nothing like this. Nothing like this. Where you think the playback's going to happen, but the phone gets hot and just freezes. Because there's so many elements going on, we took the quill, we took imagery, I did a whole bunch of AI movies that we put in the back in the theater box, right? That I sat there just trying to get... some illustrations that would convey the impact without necessarily showing any kind of bloody or violence, et cetera. But even those AI films in partnership with the volumetric capture playback and then sometimes the quill layer or an animation layer, things would just freeze. Like you don't even know that the box is frozen, it's meant to be gone. Or like I see things like, You know, one of the things that I've tried to do is talk about how many people were killed, is we put caps on telephone poles that come at you. And that's meant to be really standing on its own. And the last time I looked at it, the quill box was still there, or the deep fake was there. Then there's the deep fakes, right? Which are its own thing, where I hired actors to perform it because I find that the deep fakes that we might utilize with the AI don't have the... human expression that having somebody puppeteer the deepfake really does.
[00:19:41.777] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm going to suggest maybe we go back upstairs just to finish up, just because we've got some music that's playing here. So we'll pause for a second. Okay, we've relocated now from the Fairmont lobby where there is music. And so you're mentioning a couple of things there that I wanted to follow up on. One, around the deepfakes I want to come back to. But there's also, like when I first had started up the experience on my five or six-year-old iPhone, I was playing, but the audio started to jitter, and I could just feel my phone was really hot. So then I shut down everything. I turned it off. I let my phone cool down for about 45 minutes, did some other experiences, and I came back. And I was able to play through fine, but I understand that there's other, limitations of using these immersive technologies, even with the latest iPhones, and how that pushes to the edge of what these phones are able to do. So it sounds like trying to navigate all these different technical glitches. So I'd love to hear any collaboration on that.
[00:20:33.619] Nonny de la Peña: So you have a vision when you make these things, right? You have a goal that you're going to get there. And then reality hits you in the face, right? Of like, what can you do? And then how do you back up and re-approach? And I think it's going to, you know, obviously real true. That's true in anything in life, right? So I would say that really making content for devices that really weren't designed for that kind of content is a bit like, you know, trying to get through a day sometimes. For example, like the deepfakes. You know, originally I really wanted to cast multiple characters, but there was just no way that the phone could play back a volumetric capture of multiple characters. So I had to rethink, well, how will we give you the presence of these really important historical figures? And that's how we ended up doing deepfakes. Then I also throughout tried to hire folks with less experience to try to help, you know, as you know, when you and I first met, I mean, there must have been 300 guys there and only two or three women in this room. And I think since that first time we met until now, I've worked very, very, very hard to disrupt the monoculture and provide opportunities for lots of different artists. So that also means that sometimes some things aren't quite ready when you'd like them to be, and you have to try again a couple of times before you get it to where you want it to be. And I think I mentioned the disruption of COVID, and then I had my fire, right? So that all means that you're trying to push the tech, but I... i guess i always have right i always wanted to be better or reach for some new things i think it might have to do with my fact that i've who i am personally always want to try something new but the limitation in a phone of an augmented reality story it's a tall one right if you had it on a in a headset like a you know like a hololens you're still wearing it on your face you're able to walk around and look around but with the phone as a vehicle for display It's okay if you sort of set it down and watch a movie, but if you're actually expecting to move through the space and engage and have the person be there, the phones just aren't set up to process yet in that way. I truly believe, it's just so clear to me, that storytelling is going to be immersive. The world isn't flat. When we start to see closer and closer these immersive experiences have an effect, have a profundity, have an engagement that at some point is going to be matched by the technology itself. And it's really going to be that, you know, you have to know how to do storytelling in an immersive way. So this was a push for myself as well, trying to do AR in a phone in order to stay true to the desire, which is to really educate people about this terrible event that happened and not let it stay as a buried truth.
[00:23:30.293] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so you're showing it here at South by Southwest. How's it been going so far?
[00:23:36.701] Nonny de la Peña: Well, one of the funnest parts about being at South By this year is that I have my third cohort of graduate students now at Arizona State, and I have, I think, six students. Cameron Cotopoulos is showing his piece here. He was my first year student. Cam will tell you that when I met him, he was thinking about film, and then He was outed and thrown out by his parents, and I had to support him completely, help him through all of his processes and his project and his capstone as well as, you know, just tuition and food. So here's Cam with another blockbuster piece here, which is just friggin' amazing. Then I've got another student from this year working with Cam on his piece. I have two of my students here who've done it. really incredible job doing the entire set. I just really stayed hands off and they really helped design and put together the entire installation here. And then I have two of my recent graduates who are both collaborating And I have come to work on the piece, Gina Belafonte, who actually puppeteers one of the deep fakes, and Jonathan Williams, who helped do some of the actual coding on the project. So six students are here with me at South By. So I really feel really excited and really proud that I'm helping bring the next generation into this field.
[00:24:57.133] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's sort of like you're an extension of your legacy by all the people that you're helping to teach and mentor. And so, yeah, I'm just curious if you feel like you're in a transition of focusing more on the teaching and less than the storytelling or the projects. Yeah, just trying to get a sense of where you want to go here in the future.
[00:25:14.960] Nonny de la Peña: Well, whenever I finish a piece, I'm like, I'm done. I don't want to do this ever again. But we'll see. But I have to say, I love the teaching part of it. It does mean that I'm less, because of running this whole center, and we're doing crazy-ass stuff, like the City of All project that we've been building out is astonishing, where we're doing three things. One's a haptics for inclusion lab. Now there's a lab with civic affection using co-creation to try to break across divides. and the third we're working with a professor marcella oliva from la trade tech and kathleen cohen to with caltrans identify discarded spaces and we're teaching community members how to make digital twins and designing the green spaces they would like and then we're actually physically putting those into place adding sensors and then tracking all that data back into the digital twin so like that's a crazy different kind of creation process right of getting all that stuff up and going But it means that I'm less client-driven. So at Emblematic, when I had 16 people, et cetera, et cetera, working in the studio, that's a lot of people to make sure that they have salaries and health insurance, et cetera, et cetera. I'm still paying off loans from making sure my employees had health insurance. And that really required me to take on hat for clients, right? But what's exciting now is whatever work I do, I can now start to do it more for myself. And whether I come to a festival or don't come to a festival, the pressure there to really utilize a festival as a starting point for my career, I'm kind of past that. So it's really fun to be here with my students and see them succeed. And that may still drive me back here. But for my own personal work, I can see being a little bit more private about it and more circumspect and push whatever envelope I want. The 1906 project, it is so brutal and so disgusting what really happened. And to think that I've now got to tell that story to high school and junior high school kids, there are just limitations that are self-imposed. But in terms of my own art, I may be kind of feeling a little bit freer to experiment.
[00:27:20.003] Kent Bye: Is there a minimum model of the phones that you think you'll have to use in order to show it in the schools? Or do the students have their own phones? Or how does the distribution work in terms of actually getting it out?
[00:27:32.429] Nonny de la Peña: So the initial way that's going to go out is not just on the phone. It will include an educational package. So the museum is putting together a National Center for Civil and Human Rights Museum. It's putting together what they call a trunk exhibit where there will be phones and readings and even material to help teachers teach the story. So it's going to go in with this whole framework, and that's super cool too.
[00:27:55.805] Kent Bye: Nice. And is there a timeline for when you expect this to get out?
[00:27:59.608] Nonny de la Peña: Yeah, I'm sure by sometime over the summer, this will be done. And then, you know, we've also created, and I don't know if you saw that here, Kent, a really nice book, which has got Max Barber's original writing about it and the students who, with it, Meredith's work from the Georgia Cold Case Project, the whole, her paper that really, frankly, is one of the most in-depth things written about Max Barber together. And then on the back of that, there will be a QR code so that really that booklet could live anywhere and people be able to get to the app.
[00:28:28.908] Kent Bye: Yeah, I saw it in my home since you sent me a TestFight link to be able to check it out. And so I didn't get a chance to see it within the context of the installation, but I noticed that there was a table in there. Maybe you could just describe a little bit about the installation set and how that set is playing off of the AR experience that you've created.
[00:28:47.287] Nonny de la Peña: So, yeah, we tried to put you back in Max Barber's office. We don't know what Max Barber's office looks like, but we did a ton of research of what Atlanta looked like at the time. You know, in early stages, we were thinking we'd put you on the street while things were happening. But it was so brutal and violent that I really pulled back from that. And instead, we really let Max Barber tell you what happened in Therondary, although some of the lines were cut because the descriptions, even by Max Barber's words, were so brutal that we even pulled some of that language out. So what we want to do is really bring you back into Max's office and let you be there with him as he's telling you the story of what really happened. So the setting has also big blow-up images of key historical figures who were present at the event and who wrote about it. So anybody you hear from in the deepfake, they are the actual words of what individuals wrote. So they aren't in Max Barber's pamphlet, but they are what W.E.B. Du Bois said, what LaJunia Burns-Hobbes said, etc. Anybody who you're hearing from, that is language taken straight from history.
[00:29:57.901] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as you're hearing from some of the deepfakes, they're often in the context of a newspaper where you're seeing the headlines. And there's also later some more infographics where it's going over some of the data from W.E.D. Du Bois. So yeah, I'm just curious if you could elaborate a little bit on designing the context under which these deepfakes are existing.
[00:30:18.922] Nonny de la Peña: So you'll probably notice that in the newspapers, it's just the white folks who are in the newspapers and the black folks tend to be in these more beautiful gilded frames. And we did that on purpose because A, the things that you're hearing from these individuals in the white newspapers are pretty shocking. And again, we cut a lot of stuff out. But it just gave you an idea of how incendiary was the language coming out of the newspapers. And we wanted to emphasize that fact. So anybody who's in the newspaper tended to be one of these newspaper editors who are helping spread the lies. And then the images of the black characters, they put them in big, beautiful frames and just gave them kind of more of a richness to them, which I think was just very important to them. give what they're saying a validity so that people would understand that what they're saying had more important, more weight.
[00:31:12.682] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so coming out of South by Southwest, what's sort of your near term next plans for the project and what other things you have to do to bring everything home for the project?
[00:31:22.699] Nonny de la Peña: So there's just some art, a little bit of art that I would really like to have done, unfortunately, because the Kinfolk people kind of pulled away at a time we didn't quite finish all the quill art. So I'd like to see some of the other work, some of the animations we're working on come through. I would like to see, you know, one of the things I'm noticing for a lot of people is they're like, well, I don't really know where this thing happened. And originally it was really to be set in mostly in an Atlanta scene, so for Lentons. But now that people are talking about spreading it further, I'd like to, for example, let you take the maps and maybe pebble pieces onto the maps so you know exactly where everything happened, just to give you an idea of how widespread across the city this was. Making sure that the last of the animations, you know, maybe I have to take something out to make sure it can play down the phone. Just some really fine tuning and sound. The sound is not balanced very well. I think at home it worked great on my phone, but here when I'm hearing people with the headset and stuff, you can really hear that the music and stuff is just a little too high. You can always put on the closed caption and read it, but it's just a little bit too high. So it's not a huge amount, but I do need that last bits of fine tuning. And also funding to help the museum pay for phones or iPads and to print the booklet in a way that it deserves.
[00:32:39.896] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential for immersive storytelling and all these emerging technologies might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:32:50.379] Nonny de la Peña: So I think you know that I started this in projects for myself in 2007 where I built a virtual Guantanamo Bay in Second Life. And here we are 18 years later, still very much a fan of this kind of technology for immersive storytelling. I think I should show you some of the work I did with Mary Matheson, my colleague and my student. During the fire, I'm going to show you some of the Scannerverse ones. We went out immediately and started scanning, and this is just the phone version. This is where you look at the phone and go, oh, the phone really is this, of the firescapes, right?
[00:33:27.771] Kent Bye: This is all the L.A. fires that happened yesterday.
[00:33:31.873] Nonny de la Peña: And we did 10 days of shooting in the fires using phones, a four-camera system, lots of Gaussian splat captures. We also are building out a 4D Gaussian splat system. So that means Gaussian splats that are moving video, and we're open sourcing it so that anybody can be able to shoot Gaussian splat moving video and don't have to worry about volumetric capture costs and bizarre letters like I got from Addie Reese at D&E demanding to be listed as a director on the project this week, threatening to somehow disrupt my showing, amazingly. Who is this? Yeah, yeah. Addie Reese, the guy who does the volumetric capture at D&E. I can send you the letter. Now I'm warning everybody, never, ever go to that place. But like... Yeah. Yeah. So have control of your own processes are really great. And I hope that I'm able to make it again through my own experience, make it easier for other people. So now you can capture stuff that, you know, with Gaussian splats, with AI. it means that you can make volumetric content and you can play it back on phones and on the web in a way that is just really, really getting robust now. So that's super exciting and I feel like the control of making this stuff that I, you know, I had to bring in whole teams, now I can go out and make it myself. I hope that I'm able to provide those solutions for anyone and everyone who want to use this field for doing their own stories.
[00:35:05.350] Kent Bye: Do you have any immediate plans for what you're going to do with some of these scans of the aftermath of the L.A. fires?
[00:35:11.713] Nonny de la Peña: So there's a nonprofit effort to help local journalism. And they're basically buying and supporting local news by providing the backbone and then letting the reporters do their thing. So we publish to them. And then Niantic actually wrote a really nice blog about our work with Scannaverse in order to help raise money for the fires. We also, it's not in the greatest shape because I just wanted to get it up so we'd have it all. My immersivejournalism.com site that I put up a lot of these scans on the immersivejournalism.com site. In my fire, having scans of my horrible, horrible post-fire landscape was really helpful for me on many fronts, from processing to insurance company fights, battles. And in just one day, we scanned five of my friends' homes. So I've provided it as, you know, I've at least 30 friends who lost their homes. So I provided it as a service in a way to go out and scan people's places for them as many as we could. And also to make sure that the world doesn't forget very easily that we're able to remember this historically as the incredible, incredible, incredible tragedy and shocking, shocking thing it is. And hopefully it means that people will continue to help us rebuild.
[00:36:31.107] Kent Bye: And is that something you took your students out to do as a project as well?
[00:36:34.688] Nonny de la Peña: One of my students came. She already had a lot of journalism stuff, so I felt very confident in computer science. But it was really me, Mary Matheson, my student Ashley Bushorn, a guy named Mike Corona, who has been based in the UK, used to be the general manager for Reuters Visuals, and has been very involved in the Gaussian splat stuff. and with the lead on the 4D Gaussian splat system that we've been setting up. Also very interested in open source and sharing. And Mike happened to be in LA, and I brought him on to come shoot with us. And then a little bit from my guy, Jad Alonio, who's our tech specialist. But really, mostly, I would say, Mary, Ashley, myself, and some Mike. I mean, I could show you, we have 10 days of just from morning until it got too dark to shoot again. We shot a lot of stuff.
[00:37:24.113] Kent Bye: Wow, that's really a real public service there to help capture all that history as it's unfolding. So yeah, is there anything else that's left inside that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:37:36.263] Nonny de la Peña: Let me think. I'm sure there's a million things, but I'm just going to wait for it. Sometimes the first thing that's in my mouth, maybe I shouldn't say. No, I think it's, you know, I'm so grateful that people like Blake here, who's been the curator, still really supports what we're doing. We've seen a lot of corporations aren't giving the funds anymore. So it's going to take that kind of independent love. There are a number of us who are talking about how can we become, quote unquote, united artists. and have a distribution system that we communally support. And also, you know, back in the day, I used to 3D print my own headsets. Maybe it's time to get those 3D printing, you know, get people back making their own headsets again and take ourselves out of the ecosystem that can both love and destroy us. And I think that if we can take a little bit of control, I think we might, maybe we'll be able to grow a little more easily.
[00:38:29.059] Kent Bye: Just to follow on the cooperation of distribution, is that something you're talking to MIT OpenDAC Lab about?
[00:38:35.521] Nonny de la Peña: Yeah, so Sarah Willowsen at MIT and I have been talking about that. Oh my goodness, I'm forgetting Rory's last name.
[00:38:43.823] Kent Bye: Rory Mitchell?
[00:38:44.663] Nonny de la Peña: Yes, yeah. And Rory, we've been talking about Rory. Gina Belafonte is super interested in Sultan Sharif, who I'm lucky that I've got these amazing people that are working with me. near me. And there's a number of us who really, really see the possibility, you know, that whole thing of like, how do we grow? How do we grow as a, I've also had this incredible opportunity to be on the advisory board for a GOG, which means that I'm actually able to encourage them to support certain projects. And what a miraculous thing to do to be able to also see this field with up and coming artists or folks who just have really brilliant and wonderful impact ideas. We're going to also be doing a creator's lab with the GOG to also bring in folks who don't necessarily yet, you know, they want in but they don't really know what to do. So we're going to be doing a really cool creator's lab in the fall. So in many, many, many ways, I'm just trying to continue to grow the community, give back. And I love it. I just love it. I'm having, I'm really frankly, like, I can't believe what a good time I'm having. This piece needs to be finished and be gone because it's just hard to carry a story like this for so long. And I'll be glad when we finish, but I think I'll have to really try to do something a little more playful or more experimental, I think, for my next project.
[00:40:06.007] Kent Bye: Yeah, like you said, it's a very intense story and an intense topic. And unfortunately, there's still a lot of echoes of that story that's still playing out today. So I think it's very relevant.
[00:40:16.542] Nonny de la Peña: I would really love to talk about that, actually. What's so astonishing is when people talk about misinformation and and blame the Internet for that. And I'm like, let me just talk about 1906. That project is exactly the mirror of news organizations willing to print really incendiary lies in order to promote a political agenda. And we see that today. And so this idea that this is something new, it isn't. And the repercussions were, you know, were decades long, but perhaps we can take the information from 1906 and look at it and see what happened and maybe shortcut the damage that otherwise is going to continue to unfold.
[00:40:59.571] Kent Bye: Yeah, so it's still very relevant today as a topic, unfortunately, that all these things are still happening in different echoes. Yeah, there's a piece by Yasmeen Elliott. It's called The Changing Same. It goes through the different periods of time, showing how there's these echoes of history. So yeah, just another one of those stories that is really important, like you said, like a lost history that is being recontextualized in today's technology. Yeah.
[00:41:24.138] Nonny de la Peña: There's no such thing as winning the war for this one. It's just continuing to fight the battles. Sometimes it's just so hard to understand what brings people to these perspectives, right? And what are their fears? How do you talk to people? How do you find those spaces? And again, you know, it's spaces of agreement. of ways to treat each other with kindness, how do we delegitimize the viewpoints that are so damaging and often violent. And, you know, you just have to know that you're not necessarily going to be able to win the war against that, but you can, and anytime you can make a shift, it's a good thing, you know. One of my very first documentaries was about a gay father in a small town in Michigan who was accused of sexually abusing his son, of literally sodomizing him with a machete. He was in prison when I first made contact with him. And of course, there's no blood, no cuts, no anything like that, right? It was pure homophobia. And it turns out that the stepfather had been beating the boy. And rather than be accused himself, he accused the father of sexual abusing the kid in order to deflect attention on himself. Eventually, the boy grows up, sees the film I made about it. And by the way, when he came with our cameras, he got out. The prosecutors had notes there about the boy admitting that or talking about his stepdad beating him. And rather than have our cameras on them, they let him go. They let him out. This is after five years in prison, right? and the boy eventually sees the film right now the boy they started when the boy was five and boys like 18 or 19 or 20 realizes what has actually happened knows his father never did this to him ends up getting his own high school girlfriend pregnant just like stephen did before he realized he was gay and stephen my character ends up raising his boy's daughter And there's all these beautiful pictures in Facebook and, you know, of him sitting after school and these, like, pink jackets and bows and da-da-da. And, you know, Stephen will tell you that if we hadn't come in for that one project, he may have stayed in prison. So, you know, that's a lot of lives affected, even when you think you're just going to go help Stephen. Suddenly the future unfolds and things happen that you don't expect. So these battles are just, they sometimes feel overwhelming sometimes. But if you have something you think is unjust or unfair, please speak out.
[00:43:53.950] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thanks again so much, Nani, for all the work that you've been doing, not only on this project, but all for the entire industry and the legacy of immersive journalism. And I can really start to see the little seeds of your legacy starting to be planted and continue to grow in many different ways. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to capture this little moment in history of your journey as it continues to unfold.
[00:44:15.171] Nonny de la Peña: I first also have to thank you for being here all the way through. And I will always be grateful to have felt so small and so solo as that only woman at that Silicon Valley virtual reality meeting can and for you to single me out to come speak to me always has shown what kind of an amazing character you are. Thank you.
[00:44:32.419] Kent Bye: Yeah, quite welcome. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And there is a lot that's happening in the world today. And the one place that I find solace is in stories, whether that's a great movie, a documentary, or immersive storytelling. And I love going to these different conferences and festivals and seeing all the different work and talking to all the different artists. And sharing that with the community, because I think there's just so much to be learned from listening to someone's process to hear about what they want to tell a story about. And even if you don't have a chance to see it, just to have the opportunity to hear about a project that you might have missed or to learn about it. And so this is a part of my own creative process of capturing these stories and sharing it with a larger community. And if you find that valuable and want to sustain this oral history project that I've been doing for the last decade, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Every amount does indeed help sustain the work that I'm doing here, even if it's just $5 a month. That goes a long way for allowing me to continue to make these trips and to to ensure that I can see as much of the work as I can and to talk to as many of the artists as I can and to share that with the larger community. So you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
