There has been a spike of interest in the portrayal of what refugees have to go through in their daily lives in the form of virtual reality (VR), and one of the latest pieces that has come out is from the international medical humanitarian organisation, Doctors Without Borders, or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), with a video worked into Forced From Home.

The video that will be used in the Forced From Home exhibit will be interactive and educational and will be situated inside a 30-foot diameter dome where the 360 video will be projected. The video will feature locations such as Tanzania, Lebanon, and South Sudan, and viewers will be taken into the locations and be guided by Doctors Without Borders aid workers who will share their stories. The video was made with Visualise, a London-based VR studio, using six GoPro cameras attached to a rig.

Michael Goldfarb, Director of Communications for MSF-USA, spoke of how the general public will be able to see refugee camps, treacherous seas, and lengthy and dangerous migratory routes where people find themselves embarking on in VR: “People fleeing for their lives are very often reduced to numbers and statistics.  But through virtual reality and immersive 360 degree video, we will put a real human face on those staggering numbers, giving the public as real a sense as possible of what it looks like, feels like, and what it means, to be forced from home.”

Most of the shots are static, such as the Domiz refugee camp in Iraq where there are 40,000 Syrian refugees, which was captured by a camera rig attached to a car to capture the sheer size of the camp.

The video will be launching in New York in the US this year in September, and will carry on to be taken across the US. The video will be available on YouTube, Facebook 360, and the Forced From Home website.

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