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When a regional Ukrainian news outlet approached us with a bold idea—reconstructing a shelled children's hospital inside a headset—we knew the concept could reshape how Australians and other distant audiences process the human cost of war. The foundation had been searching for projects that combined rigorous reporting with emerging storytelling tools, and the proposal fit our focus on funding work that travels beyond traditional text and broadcast formats.
The resulting 360-degree experience lets viewers walk through corridors lined with broken glass, peer into an operating theatre stripped of its equipment, and read the names of staff who continued treating patients through the shelling. The piece was built by a small team in Kharkiv using consumer-grade headsets, off-the-shelf cameras, and photogrammetry software that stitched thousands of frames into navigable spaces.
The outlet in question had already built a reputation for courtroom coverage and local council reporting before the full-scale invasion. Once the war began, its journalists pivoted to documenting damaged schools, transit hubs, and medical facilities, publishing still photographs and drone video on a daily newsfeed. When the grant arrived through our supporting media startups in post-conflict regions programme, the team redirected a portion of those funds toward immersive production.
Staff spent six weeks scanning the hospital, interviewing survivors, and recording ambient audio. The final package runs just under fifteen minutes, but the editors chose to break it into chapters so users could linger in particular rooms. A short companion essay accompanies the headset version, giving readers without VR hardware a textual pathway through the same evidence.
Flat photography can show rubble; it cannot convey scale, acoustics, or the unsettling quiet of a building that once held crying infants. Researchers at the University of Melbourne have noted that audiences retain spatial information longer when they navigate an environment themselves, and similar findings are driving investment in immersive news by outlets across the Asia-Pacific region. The Kharkiv team leaned on that psychology, hoping readers would remember the texture of a cracked tile floor or the echo inside a ward.
The hospital piece also serves a forensic purpose. Investigators documenting attacks on civilian infrastructure often struggle to present physical evidence to international courts and journalists working from Sydney, Tokyo, or Berlin. A navigable reconstruction lets prosecutors rotate around blast patterns and demonstrate impact vectors in ways that still images cannot replicate.
The technical pipeline began with a handheld camera and a laptop loaded with photogrammetry software. Volunteers from a local university helped process the scan, which was then imported into a game engine and optimised for standalone headsets. The foundation covered software licences, two mid-range devices for editorial review, and a modest stipend for a sound designer who recreated the facility's pre-war atmosphere using foley techniques.
Costs stayed low because the team reused assets from earlier reporting trips, including a Ukrainian media infrastructure map that helped the producers geolocate the hospital precisely. That overlap reduced travel time and allowed journalists to focus on narrative scripting rather than logistics.
Australians have shown a growing appetite for conflict reporting that goes beyond the nightly ABC bulletin. SBS's multilingual platforms regularly feature long-form Ukrainian content, and Brisbane's startup scene has begun experimenting with immersive documentaries for regional audiences. The hospital tour was designed to be hosted on any web browser, with a headset mode for those who own the hardware, which lowered the barrier for classrooms and community groups.
We worked with an Australian digital rights advisor to ensure the project complied with the Privacy Act when handling interviews with hospital staff. Their guidance also shaped how faces were blurred and voices altered, protecting individuals who continued working in other medical facilities. These considerations mirror the standards applied by ACMA-regulated broadcasters, even though the final product lives on an independent platform.
Early feedback came from a Melbourne high school whose students viewed the tour on school-issued tablets. Teachers reported that the experience sparked longer classroom discussions than previous news segments about the conflict. Healthcare workers in Adelaide who had treated evacuated Ukrainian children said the reconstruction helped them understand the conditions their patients had left behind.
For the news site itself, the project opened new revenue conversations. Several international NGOs asked about licensing the reconstruction for training modules, and a Sydney-based media educator expressed interest in adapting the workflow for climate-related disaster coverage in the Asia-Pacific.
The hospital tour proved that small grants can unlock ambitious work when paired with technical mentorship. Our application window for the next round of innovation funding opens later this year, with priority given to projects that merge investigative depth with accessible formats. We are also tracking parallel work on countering Russian narratives in the global south, since disinformation campaigns increasingly target audiences far from the front lines.
Independent reporting on conflict will always need patient funders. A single VR experience cannot replace sustained field presence, but it can carry the weight of evidence into living rooms, lecture halls, and courtrooms thousands of kilometres away.
