Why no patient appears
The people who use RVer are, almost always, in a fragile moment. An older person in a care home, someone in palliative care, someone halfway through a hard treatment. An image of that person with the headset on says far more than "they were here": it says where they are, in what state, and why. That is health information, and the GDPR treats it as a special category, rightly so.
We could have chased consent forms, picked angles, blurred faces. We chose not to. The dignity of the person on the other side is not an obstacle to a healthcare company's communication: it is the starting point. So the film begins exactly there:
There are people we can't show you. And that's exactly how it should be.
What we show instead
But we can show you what they experience.
If we cannot show who uses it, we can show what they see. The rest of the film is the scenes from RVer's base library, filmed by us in 360°: the 13 May candlelight procession in Fátima, a beach at the end of the day, a drive by car, the Fragas de São Simão, the moliceiro boats in Aveiro, the grape harvest, a folk music performance.
The images look stretched, curved at the edges. That is not a flaw: it is what a 360° video looks like when it is opened on a flat screen — the front in the middle, the back at the edges. We left them that way on purpose, so it is clear this is not a frame we chose: it is the whole place around the person wearing the headset.
A place they know. A place they remember. Sometimes, somewhere they could never be.
The person in silhouette
At the beginning and the end of the film there is a backlit figure. It is a friend of the team, not a patient, and we are not giving the name. Not out of secrecy: because the name does not matter. That figure stands in for everyone we cannot show, and the film only works if it could be any of them.
It is not about the technology
For us, it's technology. For them, it's an experience.
It is easy to make a virtual reality video that is really a video about goggles: the device, the screens, the numbers. This one is not about the patient, and not about the technology. It is about what the technology brings about in the person using it: going back to a familiar place, reaching one they can no longer get to, or simply being somewhere else for a few minutes.
The headset, the back office, the clinical supervision and the rest of the system exist so that this happens safely. But they are not what stays with the person who lives the session, so they are not the film either.
What it is for
- Talks and conferences. To open a presentation before we talk about the system, in a dark room, with sound.
- Brand communication. It is the brand film: it is on this page, on the About page and in the press room.
- Journalists and digital media. We have been asked for a video of ours to go with articles for a while. Here it is. If you need it in 4K, just ask.
How it was made
It was filmed and edited by the RVer team. The 360° images are the same ones patients see in the base library. It exists in Portuguese and English, and it is two minutes long.