In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum at The Times.
Sunday home-delivery subscribers to The New York Times received something special with the Nov. 8, 2015, issue: an invitation to a different dimension.
The invitation came in the form of a Google Cardboard virtual reality viewer, a rudimentary but surprisingly effective headset for watching immersive videos. The viewer was made of cardboard, with two plastic lenses and a slot into which you placed a smartphone playing a specially formatted video from the NYT VR app. The image appeared three-dimensional when watched in the viewer. As you moved your head left and right or up and down, your point of view changed accordingly.
The headsets arrived as flattened kits that could be assembled in a minute or two. (The Times has not disclosed the cost of the project, which was sponsored by Google, General Electric and the automaker Mini.)
“Cardboard’s crudeness is also its genius,” Marcus Wohlsen wrote for Wired the next day. “It’s cheap enough to be handed out for free; we smartphone users supply the only part that’s expensive. The Times and Google could afford to drop about 1.3 million of them in the newspaper. That’s 1.3 million people who said to themselves yesterday, ‘Wait, you mean this VR thing is something I can have right here, right now, too?’”
The Times’s first virtual reality video, “The Displaced,” told of children whose lives had been upended by war and persecution. “This new filmmaking technology enables an uncanny feeling of connection,” Jake Silverstein, the editor of The Times Magazine, wrote at the time.
More than a dozen NYT VR videos were produced. But by April 2016, Sam Dolnick, then an associate editor at The Times, told Adi Robertson of The Verge that the “world’s moving beyond Cardboard pretty quickly.”
NYT VR was succeeded in November 2016 by The Daily 360, produced in collaboration with Samsung, which continued for more than a year. Although NYT VR and Daily 360 videos are still available, they are no longer offered in an immersive format. (NYT VR was officially shut down in April 2019.)
Still, The Times counts the experiment as a success. “We learned that immersive storytelling is useful for taking our audience to places they couldn’t easily access,” Jordan Cohen, a spokesman for The Times, said in a recent email. Today, the Google Cardboard viewer is truly a museum piece, in the Museum at The Times.
David W. Dunlap, a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents.
The post The New York Times From a New Point of View appeared first on New York Times.
