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Four boats approach the small harbor of Skala on the Greek island of Lesbos. The first vessel is occupied by agents of Frontex, the European Union border-control unit. The men are dressed in black, from helmets to combat boots. They tow the second boat, an inflatable dinghy with flimsy plywood baseboards that’s crammed from pontoon to pontoon with extremely cold people. Earlier this morning a smuggler in Izmir, Turkey, filled the raft with refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, handed the throttle to a young man who’d never driven a boat, and pointed toward Greece. Like so many of the thousands of vessels provided by human-smuggling mafias, this one didn’t have enough fuel and ran out of gas somewhere in the middle of the Aegean.

The third boat, a gray Zodiac, found them. It’s manned by two young men—one an out-of-work Greek, the other a Norwegian bored with his stultifying Oslo desk job. Neither of them possesses an organizational affiliation. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have come through Lesbos in the past year, as of my visit on December 18, neither Frontex nor the Greek coast guard has established much of a presence. Instead, the job of offering aid falls largely to international volunteers who have flocked to the island. A throng of them, their experience ranging from extensive to none, waits onshore with reflective survival blankets. The emergencies director of Human Rights Watch is here, as is a fashion model from Manhattan who brought perfume samples for the refugees. As the Zodiac approaches the dock, the Norwegian hurls himself into the water and ties the boat up to a mooring.

Behind the scene trails the fourth boat, a wooden vessel owned by a local fisherman. On the bow, a bearded American named David Darg holds up a small virtual-reality camera called a Ricoh Theta. Thirty-seven years old, with a reddish-brown beard, tight black jeans, and the thick build of a logger, Darg occupies a unique and peculiar role within the fast-moving world of new media.1 On the one hand he’s a crisis responder and vice president of international operations at Operation Blessing, a faith-based nonprofit. But he’s also cofounder of Ryot, a Los Angeles for-profit company that specializes in hopeful video content from developing and disaster-affected nations. He has come to Lesbos to bring the reality of the migrant crisis to the wider world. Darg calls the VR camera in his hand a “transportation device,” one capable of essentially bringing Western viewers to the world’s strife-ridden places. “You register VR as an experience you had,” he says, “rather than something you see”—a common boast about VR.

“A lot of people will make a very cool, very expensive VR experience that very few people will see.”

This phenomenon, he suggests, allows him to convey nuanced reality like never before, cutting through a media landscape saturated with two-dimensional images of suffering. It’s also essential to his plan to change the way we consume global news. Darg and Ryot’s other cofounder, a former Peace Corps volunteer named Bryn Mooser, launched the company in 2012 while giving aid in post-earthquake Haiti. Mooser, Ryot’s CEO, is 36, a tall and charismatic entrepreneur who grew up in Santa Monica and moved to Zimbabwe with his mother at age 16, eventually studying film at Bennington College and joining the Peace Corps in Gambia. Darg and Mooser’s idea was to create a new form of short, impactful storytelling to buoy the humanitarian industry. At first the company billed itself as the future of news—a sell that seemed rather ambitious, sort of like an undermanned expansion team declaring itself the future of the NBA.

But in the past year, Ryot has positioned itself as the go-to VR company for both news and humanitarian advocacy. Recently the Huffington Post, NPR, and The New York Times have lined up to work with the company. Darg, who speaks in a calm, self-assured voice, finds the old guard’s attention delicious. “They’re coming and they’re asking us for advice,” he says. “Men in suits wondering what happened now that no one’s coming to their sites any more.”2

The Greek fisherman ties up to his mooring and Darg hops out. The volunteers swarm the asylum seekers, offering blankets and water. A CNN anchor cues her cameraman and says in a dire tone that the organizer of the Paris ISIS attacks may have come through Lesbos. An Australian woman in a “Love” beanie gives a head massage to a middle-aged Muslim refugee, whose face maintains an expression of mild horror. Other refugees take selfies. Soon everyone moves up the shoreline, past a lighthouse, an olive press, limp life jackets hanging in trees, and a relief camp run by anarchists, where two dogs in wool vests lounge amiably. The group reaches another ad hoc camp, where refugees receive food and dry clothes. On the street, Darg turns his VR camera onto a young Afghan named Mustafa and asks him to address Americans who are afraid of refugees.

Mustafa’s message is simple: “I lost my parents. I would love to be beside them and not here.” And then, just as he starts to thank Lesbos’ aid workers, a locally famous cross-dresser sashays by the shivering refugees in knee-high boots and red tights, his gray hair blowing in the wind. Darg’s camera is still running.