Emblematic Group

Emblematic Group
Information
Type	Private company
Industry	Virtual reality, Immersive media, Journalism
Founded	2007 (renamed from Pyedog Productions, established 1994)
Founder	Nonny de la Peña
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Nonny de la Peña (Founder and CEO)
Products	Immersive journalism VR experiences; REACH (reach.love) WebVR authoring platform
Website	https://emblematicgroup.com

Emblematic Group is an American immersive-media studio that produces Virtual Reality, augmented, and mixed-reality experiences, with a focus on nonfiction and news. It was founded and is led by Nonny de la Peña, a former journalist who is widely credited with helping create the field of immersive journalism and who has been called the "Godmother of Virtual Reality" in coverage by The Guardian and Engadget.

The studio recreates real events using game-engine graphics combined with audio, photographs, and video captured at the scene, placing the viewer inside the reconstructed environment in room-scale virtual reality. Its best-known pieces, made with partners including PBS Frontline, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Planned Parenthood, premiered at festivals such as the Sundance Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival between 2012 and 2017. Emblematic produced Hunger in Los Angeles, shown at Sundance in 2012, which is commonly described as the first virtual reality documentary.

History

De la Peña established a production company called Pyedog Productions in 1994, after working as an associate producer on the Academy Award nominated documentary Death on the Job. In 2007 she renamed the company Emblematic Group and redirected it toward immersive nonfiction. The company describes itself as a producer of fully immersive environments that place the user inside the scene of a story, and its own pages give a founding year of 2015 for the studio in its current form.

Before founding the studio, de la Peña worked as a correspondent for Newsweek and as a freelance contributor to the New York Times, and she later became a senior research fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. As of 2026 she is the director of the Narrative and Emerging Media graduate program at Arizona State University, which she founded, while continuing to lead Emblematic.

Immersive journalism

De la Peña and Emblematic's work is built around the concept of immersive journalism, which she introduced in a 2010 peer-reviewed paper. The paper defines immersive journalism as "the production of news in a way that allows people to get first-person experiences of the events or situations described in news stories," typically by representing the viewer as a digital avatar who enters a virtually recreated scene and experiences a sense of Presence. The paper was published in the MIT Press journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments and was co-authored with Peggy Weil, Joan Llobera, Elias Giannopoulos, Ausias Pomes, Bernhard Spanlang, Doron Friedman, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Mel Slater.

The studio's typical method pairs computer-generated, game-engine reconstructions built in tools such as Unity with documentary material gathered at the real location, including recorded audio, 911 calls, photographs, and video. The aim is to convey the sights and sounds of an event and to give viewers a sense of having been present, rather than watching conventional footage.

Notable projects

Hunger in Los Angeles (2012) reconstructed a real incident outside the First Unitarian Church in downtown Los Angeles, where a man with diabetes collapsed from low blood sugar while waiting in line at a food bank. It premiered in the New Frontier program at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and is generally cited as the first VR documentary. At Sundance it was viewed through a prototype head-mounted display built at USC by Mark Bolas, Palmer Luckey, Thai Phan, and Evan Suma, an early iteration of the technology that became the Oculus Rift.

Project Syria depicted the impact of the Syrian civil war on children, drawing on documentary footage captured in the Bustan al-Qasr neighbourhood of Aleppo in November 2012. The World Economic Forum commissioned the piece and presented it at its annual meeting in Davos in January 2014, and it was later selected for the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The experience moves the viewer through a street scene, a sudden explosion, and a refugee camp.

Kiya (2015-2016) recreates a fatal domestic-violence standoff in South Carolina using real audio from 911 calls placed by two sisters trying to protect a third from her partner. It was shown at TEDWomen in 2015 and was part of the New York Times' first selection of VR pieces for the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Across the Line is a roughly five-minute piece, co-created with Brad Lichtenstein and Jeff Fitzsimmons of 371 Productions and Custom Reality Services and executive produced by Planned Parenthood, that places the viewer in the position of a patient entering a health center while protesters demonstrate outside. It combines real audio recorded at clinic protests with scripted scenes and documentary footage and debuted at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2016.

Greenland Melting is a 360-degree virtual reality film about climate change and glacial melt in Greenland, produced with PBS Frontline and NOVA and built partly with 3D data visualization, photogrammetry, and videogrammetry. It was accepted into a competition section at the 74th Venice Film Festival in 2017.

After Solitary, another Frontline collaboration, reconstructs a solitary-confinement cell at the Maine State Prison and features Kenny Moore, a formerly incarcerated man. Out of Exile: Daniel's Story (2017), shown in the New Frontier program at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, uses real audio recorded in 2014 by Daniel Ashley Pierce during a confrontation with his family over his sexuality. Use of Force, about the death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas at the United States border, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2014. Earlier, in 2007, de la Peña and Peggy Weil built Gone Gitmo, a recreation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp inside the virtual world Second Life.

A summary of selected projects:

Project	Year(s)	Premiere / venue	Subject	Partners
Hunger in Los Angeles	2012	Sundance Film Festival (New Frontier)	Collapse of a diabetic man at an LA food bank	USC prototype HMD team
Project Syria	2014 (Davos), 2015 (Sundance)	World Economic Forum, then Sundance	Children in the Syrian civil war	World Economic Forum
Use of Force	2014	Tribeca Film Festival	Death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas at the US border
Kiya	2015-2016	TEDWomen, then Sundance	Domestic-violence standoff in South Carolina	New York Times
Across the Line	2016	Sundance Film Festival	Patient entering a clinic past protesters	371 Productions, Custom Reality Services, Planned Parenthood
Greenland Melting	2017	Venice Film Festival	Climate change and glacial melt in Greenland	PBS Frontline, NOVA
After Solitary	2017	(Frontline)	Solitary confinement at Maine State Prison	PBS Frontline
Out of Exile: Daniel's Story	2017	Sundance Film Festival (New Frontier)	A teenager rejected by his family over his sexuality

REACH

In 2019 Emblematic launched REACH (reach.love), a web-based authoring and distribution platform built in partnership with Mozilla. Announced at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and released publicly that May, REACH is a no-code WebVR tool that lets users assemble and share volumetric scenes that play in a web browser without a dedicated headset. De la Peña described it as a combination of YouTube and Squarespace, intended to lower the barrier to producing and distributing immersive content.

Recognition

In 2021 de la Peña received a Peabody Award, presented in 2022, recognizing an artist or innovation that enabled new modes of interactive storytelling now in wide use; ASU and other coverage described it in connection with her work in immersive journalism. Fast Company named her one of the people who made the world more creative following Hunger in Los Angeles, and CNET listed her among the most influential Latinas in technology.