Can Immersive Journalism Restore Empathy in an Age of Information Overload?

The boundary between audience and participant has dissolved. Future audiences require being a participant and having agency in my media and in my story and in the moment that I’m entering.

Erin Reilly, Professor of Practice and Founding Director of the Texas Immersive Institute, University of Texas at Austin

Most people follow the news in short bursts. A notification, a clip, a headline, and then another one a few minutes later. The pace keeps information moving, but it often leaves little room to absorb what an event means or how it feels for the people living through it. The result is a form of distance that grows quietly: audiences stay informed, yet the experience and education behind the story becomes harder to grasp.

Immersive journalism is gaining attention as a way to close that distance. Instead of presenting events through flat images or text, immersive tools build environments that audiences can explore. Augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and multisensory design allow journalists to situate a story within physical space, sound, and reconstructed settings. These methods encourage people to slow down, look around, and consider a moment from within their environment rather than from the outside.

This shift is visible across global media discussions, including the iMEdD International Journalism Forum in Athens, where researchers and practitioners examined whether immersive storytelling can support deeper public understanding. At the center of these conversations is a simple question: can immersive environments help people reconnect with stories that require attention, empathy, and context?

To understand how these technologies are evolving and where they fit within journalism, we spoke with Erin Reilly, professor of practice and founding director of the Texas Immersive Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work with emerging media offers a grounded view of how immersive environments are designed, the tools behind them, and the possibilities they open for storytelling.

Erin Reilly is a creator, educator, and strategist. Her career spans more than 25 years, during which she has invented new approaches, products, services, and experiences for storytelling and audience engagement through immersive technology.

Reilly currently serves as a professor of practice in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations and as the founding director of Texas Immersive Institute, the interactive and immersive media hub at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on research, projects, and learning about the future of media. In her role, she has developed a new sequence of courses, guides faculty and students in imagining where innovation meets entrepreneurship, and builds university-wide initiatives, fostering relationships with other academic institutions and industry partners. She also integrated the Meta Quest 2 VR headset as the textbook for the Audience Development & Engagement class (a first for a UT Austin classroom).

As a strategist, Reilly consults with private and public companies on audience engagement, creative strategy, and transmedia storytelling. She has been a frequent guest lecturer at universities worldwide, as well as at industry conferences such as TEDx, SXSW, and the Austin Forum on Technology & Society. She is on the Hasbro Innovator list and is currently raising the second round of funding for CARPE’ Games, a new augmented reality and SMART kit game, and Winklebeans, a sensor-based toy that connects to a data-driven story world.

She was a founding member of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, holding the positions of managing creative director and research fellow from 2010 to 2018. Before that, she was research director for Project New Media Literacies at MIT and has conducted classes as a visiting lecturer at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and Harvard University’s Project Zero Summer Institute. She is a graduate of Emerson College and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in film/multimedia from Maine Media Workshops + College.

Immersive journalism is built on environments that allow audiences to enter a story rather than observe it from a distance. These environments vary in complexity, but all share the goal of helping people understand events through space, sensory detail, and interaction. For journalists, the range of tools is wider than many expect, spanning simple phone-based features to advanced digital reconstructions used for investigative or archival work. This flexibility is central to how immersive reporting is evolving, since it allows newsrooms to adopt the technology at different levels depending on their resources and experience.

When explaining this landscape, Erin Reilly emphasizes the breadth of formats available: “You can use so many different types. From a journalism standpoint, one of the best ways to do immersive experiences would be Spatial Web.”

Spatial Web, often accessed through WebAR, runs directly through a browser and requires no app installation. Reilly notes, “Anything that uses a wall is an example of WebAR. It’s where you do not need to download an application, and you can just scan a QR code, and AR automatically triggers and has overlays onto our physical location.” These overlays can add information to physical spaces in ways that support context or reveal detail. As she puts it, “WebAR is a good example of letting you know before you enter a building if they do fair trade, for example.”

Beyond AR, more advanced tools expand the possibilities for investigative storytelling. Reilly points to volumetric photogrammetry and Gaussian splats as methods for reconstructing physical spaces with precision.

“I really can see this type of photogrammetry work or Gaussian splats to recreate or rebuild crime scenes,” she says. “It could be used in war zones, kind of pointing out things that maybe were once there that are not there.”

These reconstructions allow reporters to revisit locations where evidence has shifted or disappeared, offering audiences a way to explore those spaces long after events have passed.

Accessibility is also changing. Many current smartphones include LiDAR sensors that allow for basic spatial capture. Reilly describes scanning an entire Latin American art collection inside someone’s home with only her phone, demonstrating how far mobile devices have come.

Digital twins extend the concept further by combining satellite imagery, GIS data, and photogrammetry to rebuild environments affected by disasters, protests, or environmental change. These models help journalists show how a location evolved over time and can provide visual evidence for stories that require spatial context.

Together, these tools offer journalists new ways to reconstruct reality and present information in three dimensions. They expand the range of stories that can be told, allowing audiences to explore reconstructed environments rather than merely read about them. This shift leads directly to the next question: what happens when audiences not only see a story but feel present within it?

The emotional impact of immersive journalism depends on how the environment engages the senses. Reilly has worked with a wide range of projects that combine sound, movement, temperature, and physical interaction to create a stronger sense of presence. These elements shape how audiences perceive a story because they place the participant inside an experience rather than in front of it.

One example she describes is Alejandro Iñárritu’s mixed-reality installation, Carne y Arena. The piece reconstructs the experience of an immigrant confronting border patrol officers.

Reilly recalls that participants, “Took off [their] shoes; [they] walked through this hot sand; [they] had a mixed reality headset on, and [they] were an immigrant being confronted by the border patrol.”

The installation also included spatial sound so that visitors “felt like you were having to duck and hide when the helicopter flew in, and you were hot because they had put heat around and you were walking barefoot in hot sand.” The environment responded to the participant’s movements, creating what she describes as an “open sandbox where the environment allows you to look in every direction and move around and participate.”

These multisensory elements demonstrate how immersion changes perception. Reilly explains that this kind of design “really creates a sense of presence and embodiment that you don’t get in any 2D media experience.” Presence, in this context, involves feeling physically located in a reconstructed scene, even when the participant knows they are in a controlled environment. That embodied awareness shapes attention and encourages audiences to observe details they might otherwise overlook.

Reilly’s research also highlights the importance of sound. Years ago, she conducted a study using six different VR experiences related to war, some animated and some filmed in real environments, while capturing biometric responses from participants. Across all formats, one pattern stood out.

“What I found was that audio was the number one medium to create a sense of presence in the space,” she says. “Spatial sounds draw your attention in so many different directions that it makes you feel like you’re in a 3D space, even if you know that you really feel like you’re there.” The way sound cues attention helps audiences understand scale, proximity, and tension within an environment.

These sensory elements explain why immersive journalism is gaining popularity among storytellers seeking to convey context and emotional depth. When audiences feel present, they react to a story with more focus and curiosity. They observe the space, listen to its details, and consider information from inside the moment rather than from a detached viewpoint. This shift supports a slower, more reflective form of engagement, setting the stage for how journalists may apply these tools in the field.

As interest in immersive storytelling grows, journalists often assume the work requires advanced technical skills or expensive equipment. Erin Reilly sees this misconception frequently and emphasizes that many entry points are accessible with tools most reporters already use. When teaching journalists immersive methods, she avoids starting with complex engines: “I’m not gonna teach them how to use a game engine like Unity or Unreal on day one,” she says. Instead, she introduces approaches that allow immediate experimentation.

One of those approaches is phone-based augmented reality. Reilly describes using iJack during a workshop in Greece because it showed participants how easily they could create interactive layers in their own reporting environments. “It was so easy to get them into iJack,” she explains. Through it, journalists “could upload images or animate GIFs and place them into their physical environment,” similar to setting up a gallery that audiences can walk through. She pairs this with simple spatial capture techniques, demonstrating that “you can do a LiDAR scan with your phone using Polycam” to record objects or scenes in three dimensions. The goal is to show that immersive storytelling begins with familiar tools rather than difficult software.

More advanced methods do exist and are gaining traction in documentary, investigative, and public-interest storytelling. Reilly sees these developments across multiple projects: “I’ve already seen a lot of immersive media tools being used to tell documentary experiences,” she says, pointing to Traveling While Black as an example of an experience that places audiences inside a narrative grounded in lived history.

At the Texas Immersive Institute, her team is working on Anchored Memories—a project that uses haptics and narrative VR to explore disaster resilience. Participants “feel the haptics of the wind and the rain” and “board up [their] window,” while experiencing the challenges faced by people who live in areas vulnerable to rising tides.

Other applications focus on reconstructing real environments for clarity and analysis. Reilly references colleagues at Arizona State University who created Gaussian splats of the Los Angeles fires, which “people have been using for insurance purposes.” After significant flooding in Texas, her team discussed how similar techniques could model affected areas and help audiences understand how water moved through the region. She also notes that protests or public gatherings could be captured and reconstructed, allowing journalists to preserve the spatial arrangement of events long after they conclude.

Public reaction to these environments often reveals how unfamiliar and powerful they can be. Reilly shares an example from her own family. “I have a great picture of my mother-in-law trying Magic Leap for the first time,” she says. Her reaction captured a sense of discovery as she reached toward the digital layer within her physical surroundings. For Reilly, this “sense of awe of people having a new reality layered into their reality” underscores why immersive journalism can resonate. It changes the way people enter a story and affects how they talk about it afterward.

This shift from passive viewing to active participation is central to her outlook. “The boundary between audience and participant has dissolved,” she explains. Future audiences “require being a participant and having agency in my media and in my story and in the moment that I’m entering.” She believes immersive tools help reveal forms of truth that traditional formats struggle to convey because participants “embody it” and experience events with a different kind of attention. These qualities set the stage for a broader conversation about how immersive journalism may influence public engagement as the technology continues to evolve.

Immersive journalism is developing at a moment when audiences are searching for forms of communication that feel more grounded and less fragmented. The tools used to build these environments are still evolving, yet their early applications show how spatial context, sensory detail, and interactivity can support a different type of news experience. Instead of consuming rapid updates, participants move through reconstructed scenes, follow the path of a narrative, and make sense of events through their own observations. This shift encourages a slower, more deliberate encounter with information.

For newsrooms, the question is not whether immersive tools will replace traditional reporting but how they can complement it. Many stories still rely on investigation, verification, and analysis that occur outside immersive environments. At the same time, spatial reconstructions or interactive layers can provide clarity when a story depends on understanding movement, geography, or the emotional texture of an experience. The challenge for journalists is determining when these tools add meaningful depth and when a simpler format serves the story more effectively.

Access will shape how widely immersive journalism spreads. Phone-based augmented reality offers a low-cost starting point, while more advanced methods require specialized skills, equipment, and production time. As universities, research institutes, and media organizations continue to collaborate, training and shared resources may help lower these barriers. The development of templates, mobile capture tools, and browser-based platforms suggests a future in which immersive reporting becomes more practical for a wider range of newsrooms.

The larger question concerns the role immersive journalism may play in rebuilding public trust and attention. By giving audiences time and space to inhabit a story, immersive formats encourage reflection rather than quick reaction. People move through a scene, listen to its details, and consider perspectives they might not encounter otherwise. These qualities align with a broader desire for journalism that supports understanding in a more personal and tangible way.

Immersive storytelling is still an emerging practice, but its trajectory points toward a future where audiences interact with news through environments designed to be explored, not just observed. As the field matures, its value will depend on how effectively creators use these tools to support clarity, empathy, and evidence-based reporting. The next stage of journalism may involve not only telling stories but building spaces where people can experience them with greater presence and awareness.