Viewing parties for CNN’s telecast of the first debate of the 2016 election cycle involving Democratic presidential candidates are planned today in downtown Los Angeles, the mid-Wilshire district, the Fairfax district and Pasadena.
Advertisement
The five-candidate debate was shot with five virtual reality cameras, each placed at different corners of the Wynn casino auditorium.
No matter how well or poorly candidates perform, experts said if Vice President Joe Biden enters the race, Tuesday’s democratic debate will most likely be forgotten.
But it’s possible to imagine a world where watching a debate in VR makes sense – and isn’t, as this debate was, limited to the small group of enthusiasts with a Gear VR. Easy! You can stream it live for free. That’s true for concerts, sporting events, or extreme action sports like BASE jumping: by turning your head, you can see what’s going on all around you.
The first question of that debate, addressed to Carly Fiorina, was very personal.
For that to happen, the three candidates on stage not named Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders desperately need to boost their name recognition and generate a few headlines.
But the view was fuzzy. So what approach will the moderator Anderson Cooper take? “I think these are all serious people”.
In the alternate reality described at this past Tuesday’s Democratic debate, counteracting climate change and protecting African-Americans from police shootings are the most pressing moral imperatives.
That is partly because Hillary Clinton has dominated the Democratic field for months. “Politics aside”, he tweeted, “a significant live event, famous faces, in 3D & in VR…transforming!” “Americans will either find a pleasing contrast in Tuesday’s debate to the attack-filled show Republicans have put on – or they’re going to be bored senseless”, the Washington Post wrote on Tuesday in a teaser for a story headlined “Democrats see a more substantive, if sleepy, debate than rowdy GOP show”. The cameras certainly exist for such an enterprise. The one last week was so pathetic I don’t know how anyone could watch it from beginning to end without having to run to the bathroom to vomit and reaching for the bromo-seltzer on the way out.
Advertisement
The night’s official hashtag, #DemDebate, also trended both on Facebook and Twitter for the entire evening. I know this because I shifted back to plain old CNN several times-when my Samsung Galaxy phone overheated, when the video froze, and when the novelty just plain wore off. The takeaway line of the night was the senator’s assertion that “Americans are sick and exhausted of hearing about [Clinton’s] damn e-mails”, but the more important part of that statement was his reminder to myopic media that “I go around the country, talk to a whole lot of people”. I’m not sure how any of this would work, but I already look like a huge dork wearing VR goggles. Had Obama leveraged the mass movement that arose to get him elected, Sanders believes he could have more easily bent Congress and Republicans to his will, and made lengthier, more progressive strides than he did.
