Virtual Realities: Documentary’s Immersive Turn — Mandy Rose at Utrecht University

The following text is a summary of what Mandy Rose presented during her visit to Utrecht University. The summary is written by Lisa Burghardt but the ideas and arguments presented are based on Mandy Rose’s talks.

On May 15, the project team of “Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament” hosted Professor Mandy Rose at Utrecht University, for a masterclass and public lecture on the “immersive turn” in documentary filmmaking. The day, organised with the support of Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi, Lisa Burghardt, and Laurence Herfs, brought together PhD candidates, Research Master students, and a wider public audience to explore how Virtual Reality (VR) is reshaping nonfiction storytelling. The programme featured a morning masterclass with students from across the Netherlands, followed by a public lecture that opened the discussion to a broader audience. In between the masterclass and the public lecture, we also organized a VR session on the award-winning VR experience “All I know about Teacher Li” by Zhuzmo. 

The following blog reflects on the main ideas introduced by Mandy Rose and further discussions throughout the day. Both, the masterclass and public lecture were guided by a mix of historical contextualization, practice-based examples and theoretical ideas. Throughout the day, Mandy Rose wove together documentary evolution with the new possibilities—and pitfalls—offered by Virtual and Mixed Reality. This led to a day filled with compelling, sometimes provocative, thoughts about nonfiction storytelling in what she calls our polycrisis. 

Reflections on innovation in documentary making

Drawing on her career, she stressed one of her guiding principles, which she returned to throughout the day: Always Historicize! In this call, she is inspired by the work of Fred Jameson, American Marxist literary critic. For her, this means to “always consider the historical context and development of any object, idea, or social phenomenon” (Rose, 2025). Mandy Rose traced how documentary has continually evolved in response to new technologies: from the Lumière brothers’ portable camera (1895) to the arrival of sound (1935) which allowed to bringing the specificity of other people to audiences. She discussed this through the example of the documnetary Housing Problems, which is supposed to tell the stories of people living in slums through “their voice”. From this, to the 1960s’ handheld sync sound, which allowed to get rid of the tripod. A revolution that birthed Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité.  This also led to the idea of documentary following the principle of “fly on the wall”, which lead to what Mandy Rose considers “a powerful linkage between documentary and truth” (Rose, 2025).  

The digital era brought further disruption: new funding models, new distribution channels, and new forms like interactive, participatory, gamified and personalised documentaries. Relating these developments to VR, Mandy Rose argues that VR implies something different, in a sense that it is not just another “new camera,” but a medium that allows for new levels of immersion, activating participants senses and bodies in unique ways. 

The uptake of VR in documentary making

Although VR technology has roots in the 1960s, its resurgence in the 2010s led to uptake and what can be considered a “VR hype” amongst nonfiction documentary makers. While VR technologies have found applications in industrial training, medical simulation, and design, their adoption by nonfiction media producers in the 2010s was both rapid and somewhat unexpected. Mandy Rose links this in part to documentary’s historical aspiration to “engage viewers with the real” (Rose, 2025) or “the feeling of being there”, as formulated by Direct Cinema pioneer Richard Leacock in his auto biography. The arrival of consumer VR hardware such as the Oculus Rift in 2014 provided a new technical pathway for pursuing this aspiration.

The uptake was further encouraged by industry discourse. Initiatives such as VR for Good positioned immersive media as socially beneficial, while key moments, most notably Chris Milk’s 2015 TED Talk describing VR as an “empathy machine”, helped frame the medium as affective and morally good. Mandy Rose notes the hyperbolic nature of such claims, which risk falling into technological determinism, yet acknowledges their role in accelerating both investment and experimentation.

As part of the VR Doc Encounters project that Mandy Rose was a part of, the VR Doc Encounters database recorded over 600 English-language nonfiction VR works, between 2012 and 2018. The majority were 3DoF 360° videos—often termed cinematic VR—which allow for panoramic viewing but do not permit interaction with the environment. By the end of the 2020’s, VR nonfiction had established a presence on the international festival circuit, with dedicated showcases at Sundance, Tribeca, IDFA’s DocLab, and, from 2018 on, a full “Venice Immersive” at the Venice Film Festival. Cannes has since added an immersive section, and permanent exhibition venues, though limited, are emerging, such as the forthcoming Undershed space at Bristol’s Watershed.

Critiques of VR

For all its promise, non-fiction VR brings challenges. Media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that VR is “a medium whose purpose is to disappear” (Bolter and Grusin 1999). By design, it erases the frame, which usually provides some kind of indication to viewers about how an image has been shaped by its creator. Without that frame, it can be harder for audiences to engage critically with the director’s perspective. Documentary theorist Kate Nash (2018) critiques what she calls improper distance. Mandy Rose described it as follows: “the feeling that you are entering the world of the documentary potentially elides your actual and metaphorical distance from what you are looking at – and represses an awareness of privilege and structural inequality” (Rose, 2025). 

A further concern is the tendency for immersive works to prioritise affective engagement over critical reflection. Lisa Nakamura’s (2020) critique of humanitarian VR, for its ways that it often encourages a “feeling good about feeling bad”, amongst participants. This highlights the risk of substituting emotional validation for deeper socio-political understanding. Considering these critiques, Mandy Rose stresses that these critiques are important and relevant to consider, instead of assuming that VR is doomed, we need to explore new directions and approaches to immersive documentaries. She highlights that it is important for immersive documentaries to not just to make people feel, but to help them think, question, and imagine differently.

VR storytelling done differently

During both the masterclass and the public lecture, Mandy Rose introduced participants to a variety of inspiring examples that, in her view, offer insights into how to do VR storytelling differently.

Challenging Anthropocentric modes of storytelling

During her talks Mandy Rose introduced inspiring VR works, amongst others, made by UK-based creative studio Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF). She discussed three examples (an informal trigology) of multisensory nonfiction VR projects that explore what David Abram (1996) calls the “more-than-human” world.

• In the Eyes of the Animal (2015) invites participants to inhabit the sensory perspectives of a dragonfly, owl, or frog. This is done via LiDAR-based visuals, which allow to make detailed three-dimensional scans of objects and surfaces, tactile vibrations, and even forest scents and textures. This Mixed Reality approach displaces the human point of view and thus challenges the idea of objective perception. Instead, participants are invited to explore how the animals they embodie perceive and interact with their environments.
• Treehugger: Wawona (2016) deepens sensory language by combining touch (hugging a giant sequoia tree), scent, and visuals revealing the tree’s inner life, fostering emotional and ecological connection. Participants are placed into the inside of a sequoia tree, to explore its inner systems. 
• We Live in an Ocean of Air (2018) is a shared VR space, using breath and heart rate sensors to make visible the connection between plants and humans, highlighting interdependence with air, trees, and other beings. By making visible the connection we have to other living beings around us, invites participants to rethink the dependence and responsbility we have towards the more-than-human world. 

Across these works, MLF moves nonfiction VR beyond sight and sound into “other sensory dimensions” (Rose, 2025). For her, the three examples challenge other modes of storytelling done through VR in a way that “Immersants aren’t told what to do or what to think by a narrator. Visuals and sound are important dimensions of the works, but the works can’t be understood through these alone” (Rose, 2025). To engage with this storytelling otherwise, Mandy Rose draws inspiration from phenomenological film scholar Laura Marks (2000) who “calls the forms of knowledge derived from embodiment ‘tactile epistemologies’” (Rose, 2025). Quoting Laura Marks, Mandy Rose described that tactile epistemologies “conceive of knowledge as something gained not on the model of vision, with its connotations of dominance, but through physical contact” (Marks 2000, as seen in Rose 2025). Based on this concept, Mandy Rose argues that tactile epistemology “provides an apt conceptual framework through which to think about the forms of knowledge production at play within the multisensory experiences emerging within VR and MR nonfiction” (Rose 2025). Approaching VR storytelling through tactile epistemology allows to move beyond Donna Harraway’s notion of the “God trick” (Haraway 1988) where participants can “see everything from nowhere” (Haraway 1988, as seen in Rose 2025), so typical of twentieth-century factual media. Instead, these works offer experiences of tactile epistemology, where meaning unfolds as immersants navigate their media environment and attune to the effects of their multisensory engagement. Here, knowledge is not achieved through mastery but through openness and vulnerability (Rose, 2025). 

Speculative VR storytelling as critique

VR is also being used to challenge assumptions that documentaries must represent the present or the past. The speculative imagining of the future has been less common, often perceived as incompatible with the genre’s claims to accuracy. VR’s spatial and experiential qualities, however, have made it an interesting medium for works that play with speculation. A leading example is Biidaaban: First Light, produced by Anishinaabe artist Lisa Jackson (2018) for the National Film Board of Canada. The project uses virtual reality to reimagine Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square after nature has reclaimed it. In this speculative yet highly realistic vision, waterways cut through the city, trees grow through sidewalks, and residents travel by canoe and grow food on rooftops. No English is spoken; instead, the use of Wendat, Kanien’kehá:ka, and Anishinaabe offer glimpses into Indigenous worldviews, where time, relationships, and land are understood differently from Euro-Western norms. 

Lisa Jackson’s VR piece is part of a broader movement of Indigenous Futurism (see https://fourthvr.com by Keziah Wallis & Miriam Ross), in which immersive technology is used to challenge colonial narratives and imagine decolonized futures. Other works on the FourthVR website, documented by Keziah Wallis and Miriam Ross—such as Future Dreaming (2018) and Thalu: Dreamtime is Now (2018)—also use VR to dismantle colonial narratives, often employing non-linear conceptions of time to connect ancestral knowledge with imagined futures. For Mandy Rose, works like Biidaaban show that immersion might actually allow to deepen historical awareness. Biidaaban invites audiences to inhabit a future that centres Indigenous knowledge, revealing both the violence of settler-colonialism and the possibilities beyond it. Mandy Rose suggests that we can conceptually think of such works through Raymond William’s “structures of feeling”. Through this lens feelings are considered “not as individual human emotion but rather as a historical and cultural phenomenon – as the shared attitude of a particular era” (Rose 2025). Works like Biidaaban surface consciousness of “subordinated experience” – in this case the perspectives of Indigenous peoples- while inviting audiences into post-consumerist worlds. 

This speculative mode of storytelling reaches another level in Gondwana (2021) by Ben Andrews and Emma Roberts. Mandy Rose concluded her talk with this final example, as for her Gondwana ties together her main arguments. Moreover, the affordance of 6DoF VR, which is made use in Gondwana, allwos to “address structures of feeling in relation to the environmental impact of climate change” (Rose, 2025).  Gondwana is a room-scale simulation of Australia’s Daintree Rainforest projected into the year 2090 using climate data, ecological modelling, and computer-generated environments. As participants wander through changing ecosystems (each year represents fifteen minutes), they witness the accelerating effects of climate change on biodiversity and seasonal rhythms. There is no narrative, map, or control, only observation and witnessing the terrible loss of ecosystems due to human-induced climate change. 

Together, these examples show how VR can transform nonfiction from a medium of detached observation into one of immersive, embodied, and speculative engagement, whether by decentring anthorpocentric views or speculating through different modes of storytelling and imagining different futures. They demonstrate how VR’s affordances can nurture new structures of feeling. As Mandy Rose put it, these examples show that VR might allow for “a form of virtual lived experience that supports what Raymond Williams calls ‘the articulation and formation of…newly possible consciousness” (Rose, 2025). 

Conclusion

During the master class and public lecture at Utrecht University, Mandy Rose critically explored VR’s role in documentary through historicising it’s developments over the years and linking it to practice-based ways of engaging with the technology. She showcased that VR’s role in documentary and non-fiction storytelling marks a shift towards more embodied, multisensory and speculative forms of storytelling. Through compelling examples, she illustrated how VR might allow to challenge dominant perspectives and provoke new ways of knowing. Without falling into the trap of extractive practices or merely focusing on making audiences feel, storytelling through VR offers opportunities to reimagine other worlds. In her examples she introduced works that do so through experimenting with multispecies encounters or indigenous futurisms. For Mandy Rose, the most compelling works are those that use VR’s affordances not to erase critical distance, but to expand different ways of knowing. 

Literature

Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Pantheon books.

Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1198x4c.

Nakamura, Lisa. 2020. “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy.” Journal of Visual Culture 19 (1): 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259.

Nash, Kate. 2018. “Virtual Reality Witness: Exploring the Ethics of Mediated Presence.” Studies in Documentary Film 12 (2): 119–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796.