Filter Bubble Roulette
Overview
A mobile VR experience to inhabit user-specific social media feeds based on volumetric video interviews with a range of New Yorkers. Exhibited at the Tech Museum of Innovation. Winner of Mozilla's "Reality Redrawn" Tech Innovation Challenge in May 2018.
Details
Tools: Unity, Depthkit with DSLR & Kinect, Photoshop, Blender, Audacity, Zoom
Emily Saltz: 3D design and research, Sarah Schwartz: Cinematography and production
Background
Filter Bubble Roulette tells five stories through point-of-view interviews with subjects from diverse backgrounds interacting with their news feeds, as well as a “Russian troll” pretending to be a Trump supporter. We created the project to investigate the separation of social media bubbles leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
Process
I recruited four interviewees on Craigslist. After respondents filled out surveys on their demographics, politics, and news habits, I selected a cross-section of people to interview representing different backgrounds. After each interview, I created digital environments populated with the media they described seeing and hearing in their bubbles.
Experience
Users gaze on the "Next Bubble" button to switch between stories. The interviewees describe what they see while scrolling through their news feed on their phones, as well as their general attitudes around news media and politics while elements from their news feeds float above their heads. This includes interviewee-specific advertisements, from EDM music festival ads to ads for bunion treatment. The ads glitch and shake as they spin.
In addition to the four "real" interview subjects, I created a Russian troll impersonating a Trump-supporting American. The content in "Martha's" bubble was all adapted from actual words and images shared by employees of the Internet Research Agency in Russia.
