Nonny de la Pena

Nonny de la Peña is an American journalist, documentary filmmaker, and virtual reality creator credited with founding the practice of immersive journalism, the use of VR to place an audience inside a first-person account of a news event. She is the founder and chief executive of Emblematic Group, a studio that produces virtual, augmented, and mixed reality nonfiction. Her 2012 piece Hunger in Los Angeles, shown at the Sundance Film Festival, is widely described as the first virtual reality documentary, and the headset built to present it was an early prototype of what became the Oculus Rift.

She has been called "the Godmother of Virtual Reality" by Forbes and The Guardian. Since 2021 she has been a professor of practice at Arizona State University, where she is the founding director of the Narrative and Emerging Media graduate program in Los Angeles.

Background and early career

De la Peña was raised in Venice, California. She earned a bachelor's degree in sociology and visual and environmental studies from Harvard University, a master's degree from the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and a PhD in media arts and practice from USC's School of Cinematic Arts.

Before her work in virtual reality she spent more than two decades in print, film, and television. She was a correspondent for Newsweek beginning in 1987 and a freelance contributor to The New York Times from 2007 to 2010. She founded the production company Pyedog Productions in 1994 and directed documentaries including The Jaundiced Eye and Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties (2004). Fast Company named her one of the people who "made the world more creative" for her work in immersive journalism.

Immersive journalism

De la Peña set out the concept of immersive journalism in a 2010 paper, "Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News," published in the MIT journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. Her co-authors were Peggy Weil, Joan Llobera, Elias Giannopoulos, Ausiàs Pomés, Bernhard Spanlang, Doron Friedman, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Mel Slater. The paper argues that placing a viewer's virtual body inside a reconstructed scene can produce a stronger sense of presence and empathy than text or video reporting.

Her early experiments grew out of work at USC, where she was a senior research fellow at the Annenberg School starting in 2009. An earlier project, Gone Gitmo (with Peggy Weil), recreated the Guantanamo Bay detention camp inside the online world Second Life.

Hunger in Los Angeles and the Oculus connection

Hunger in Los Angeles debuted in the New Frontier program at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The piece reconstructs a real incident outside the First Unitarian Church in downtown Los Angeles, where a man with diabetes collapsed into a diabetic coma while waiting in a food-bank line. De la Peña built the scene from audio she recorded on site, using computer-animated figures and recorded sound to let viewers walk around the event. She has described the audience reaction at Sundance as people crying and kneeling beside the virtual man.

The head-mounted display used to present the work at Sundance was assembled at USC by Mark Bolas, Palmer Luckey, Thai Phan, and Evan Suma in Bolas's MxR Lab. Luckey worked as a production assistant on the project, and the headset was an early version of the design he later commercialized as the Oculus Rift, the company he sold to Facebook in 2014.

Emblematic Group

De la Peña rebranded Pyedog Productions as Emblematic Group in 2007. The studio has produced immersive nonfiction in partnership with outlets including PBS Frontline, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and the Associated Press. Selected projects:

Title	Year	Notes
Hunger in Los Angeles	2012	Premiered at Sundance; widely described as the first VR documentary
Project Syria	2014	Commissioned by the World Economic Forum; reconstructs a street bombing in Aleppo from cell-phone footage
Use of Force	2014	Reconstruction of the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas at the US-Mexico border; supported by the Tribeca Film Institute, Google, and the Associated Press
Kiya	2015	Domestic-violence story commissioned by Al Jazeera
Across the Line	2016	Depicts harassment outside a reproductive-health clinic
After Solitary	2017	With PBS Frontline; a formerly incarcerated man describes solitary confinement
Greenland Melting	2017	With PBS Frontline and NOVA; climate reporting on Greenland's ice sheet

In 2019 Emblematic, working with Mozilla and the Knight Foundation, launched REACH, a browser-based authoring tool that lets people without coding experience build and share volumetric VR scenes over the web. It was announced at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Arizona State University

In 2021 de la Peña joined Arizona State University to design and lead a graduate program and center in emerging media and narrative based in Los Angeles, in a role held jointly across the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She is a professor of practice and the founding director of the Narrative and Emerging Media program at the Sidney Poitier New American Film School.

Recognition

Forbes and The Guardian have called de la Peña "the Godmother of Virtual Reality". In 2022 she received a Peabody Award, the inaugural Field Builder Award, which honors work that enabled or inspired new modes of interactive storytelling. The award was presented by filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu. She is a member of the BAFTA VR Advisory Group and a 2018 New America National Fellow.