VR, it seems, is finally edging into the mainstream. “They feel like they’re in whatever world they’ve been placed into.” “It’s really deep immersion,” Herzog told me later. They’d read about this stuff and seen videos about it. Later, when they put their headsets down, the students told Herzog they were stunned by the intensity of the experience-and how much more emotionally they intuited the brutal dislocations wrought by war. (Full disclosure: I sometimes write for the New York Times Magazine too.) As Herzog’s students craned their necks around, they saw the swampy terrain of South Sudan and the dilapidated buildings where the Ukrainian children played.
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It was called “The Displaced,” and came courtesy of a free VR app launched by the New York Times Magazine, which you view by placing a phone in a Google Cardboard viewer.
The kids were viewing VR footage of refugee children who’d fled war in South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine. But mentally, they were teleporting around the world. Their bodies, officially, were at Flood Brook School in Vermont, perched atop stools and set among a set of comfy couches, whiteboards and cubbies. If you walked into Charles Herzog’s classroom last spring, you’d have seen a peculiarly modern sight: middle schoolers all staring into virtual-reality gear. Jim Naughten’s 2017 stereograph, The Toucans, mimics the look of a Victorian image.