“There’s a deafening apathy to all of the stories about refugees in a situation like Aleppo in Syria. To be honest, people don’t care any more, and we’ve had a few years of beating our heads against the wall trying to make people care.”

As a freelance photographer and videographer, Christian Stephen has been trying to tell stories from war zones for the last half a decade while fretting about this challenge. His latest film, Welcome To Aleppo, uses technology to try to solve it.

“There’s an unfortunate and frankly criminal inability to connect to the stories that are going on, bordering on contempt. By tapping into virtual reality, in its basest form we’re allowing people to connect with the story,” says Stephen.

“Instead of sitting through 45 seconds on the news of someone walking around and explaining how terrible it is, you are actively becoming a participant in the story that you are viewing.”

Welcome To Aleppo is the work of production company RYOT, shot by Stephen – who is the company’s global editor – earlier this year, working with Syrian journalist Adnan Hadad to show the urban frontline of the civil war there.

The short film has been published on YouTube as a 360-degree video that can be watched on a smartphone or tablet, moving the device around you to pan your viewpoint on the bombed-out buildings and eerily quiet streets.

RYOT was founded by a pair of humanitarian aid-workers who are also filmmakers, and for the last six months it has been exploring the potential of virtual reality (VR) documentaries, including one on the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Nepal, and now in Aleppo.

“VR is the most exciting technology we’ve found. It puts people squarely in the shoes of somebody else, so they can see through their eyes and experience the scale of devastation in some of these places. Scale is a really important aspect to this,” says producer Bryn Mooser, who is also co-founder of RYOT.

“When you’re in these places in real life, you’re seeing the scale: the scope of the disaster and how big a crisis is. That’s something that’s very difficult to translate through traditional photography, or even through film. Virtual reality is going to change disaster and crisis-response filmmaking for good.”

RYOT is not alone in this claim that VR documentaries are not about gimmicky use of new technology for the sake of it, but rather are about getting viewers to feel. In January, filmmaker Chris Milk made a similar pitch, following the release of his VR film about the Millions March protest in New York.

“Being able to put people in the place gives them not just a better sense of it, but gives them more empathy and a deeper emotional connection to the people that were actually there,” he said. “That’s where the true power of virtual reality lies in regards to journalism.”

Mooser says that RYOT doesn’t just want viewers to feel more connected to the people and places that it’s filming, though. He claims that VR will only be useful if it spurs those viewers into action.

“Virtual reality has been called an empathy machine: a way to elicit empathy. But empathy doesn’t matter to me. I want what’s after the empathy, which is the action. Yes, it’s a terrible place, but the real goal is to get people to do something after it,” he says.

In the case of Welcome to Aleppo, that means directing people to a page on the producer’s website encouraging donations to the White Helmets, a volunteer group of Syrian civilians who try to rescue people from the rubble of bomb explosions.

Capturing this footage has its challenges, not least when like Stephen, you’re in a live warzone trying to set up a filming contraption with six GoPro cameras that, to passersby, may look quite a lot like an improvised explosive device [IED]. And, indeed, to nearby snipers.

Mooser talks about one scene in the film that shows a seemingly-empty street in Aleppo, with the whistling wind interrupted only by the sound of two sniper shots ringing out.

“The technology is a double-edged sword: I don’t have to check my lenses and look for a beautiful angle and do focus pulls. But it looks like an IED on a tripod, with six GoPros that need to be switched on. It’s incredibly precarious,” says Stephen.

Filmmakers like Stephen and Milk are having to figure out the language of virtual-reality filmmaking as they go along, too. “The rules have yet to be written on how you tell stories in VR, but the good thing is that the technology is out of the hands of engineers and into the hands of artists, war journalists and filmmakers,” says Mooser.

Setting up a camera system that resembles an IED is ‘precarious’

Sceptics may wonder if the importance of the stories being told from places like Nepal and Aleppo is matched by the potential distribution if they are released as virtual reality films.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg wants to sell 50m-100m of his company’s Oculus Rift VR headsets in the years ahead, but so far the pre-commercial versions of the device have only sold in the low six-figures – and then only to developers.

Other headsets, from Sony’s Project Morpheus to HTC’s Vive, have also yet to go on sale to the general public. Which would beg the question of whether the situation in Aleppo is too important to restrict its (potentially) most-powerful reports to a niche audience of tech early-adopters.

Or rather, it would do, if it wasn’t for YouTube – which recently added the ability for people to upload 360-degree videos – and smartphones, which can be used to watch them, either on their own or using a self-made headset like Google Cardboard.

“Virtual reality now is mobile-first. We’re uploading these in 360 to YouTube, and I’m sure Facebook is going to have an in-app player as well. When Facebook is able to show 360-video, anybody with a mobile phone will be able to watch it by moving the phone around them,” says Mooser.

“We want these films to be on every single platform they can be on. I wouldn’t want to be in the headset business of virtual reality now. Headsets aren’t going to be the way it goes: it’s just your phone.”

“And let’s be honest, in four or five years it will be on a contact lens with augmented reality, which is the next step. To be in the headset game is not interesting for me. You don’t need headsets for this: you just need a phone and YouTube, or soon a phone and Facebook.”

There may still be a question about whether mobile + YouTube can be as immersive as a headset: does the scale of the potential audience dent the feeling of scale when watching, which Mooser talked about earlier?

If the streets of Syria are on your phone held in front of you amid your real-world surroundings, rather than your entire field of vision as they would be with a headset, breaking through the apathy barrier could be harder. Mooser’s tales of people crying after watching Welcome to Aleppo on his phone suggest he’s optimistic that this won’t be the case, however.

Stephen says he hopes virtual reality can ultimately take the emphasis away from “running and gunning” format that dominates many TV news reports of crises and warzones.

“I’ve done that stuff: dispatches where people see me getting shot at, bombs going off, whatever. But people think that’s cool, and what I’m trying to communicate is that this is absolutely not cool, fun, thrilling,” he says.

“This is adrenaline, and terror, and fear that empties out of your shoes. When you’re standing on the streets of Aleppo with two shots ringing out, I want an eerie silence. I want haunting quiet. That’s what it’s like when you’re there. Covering these stories shouldn’t be trivial.”