Tony Dokoupil has recently traveled to Medyka in Poland, Miami and Minneapolis, too. Over the course of a career in journalism, he has visited all 50 states in the U.S. Even so, he will be stepping onto new terrain when he launches a new series on Thursday on “CBS Mornings.”
As part of “Mornings in the Metaverse,” set to air weekly, Dokoupil will take viewers of the CBS News program into the virtual-reality realm that experts are predicting will eat up more of our overall bandwidth in months and years to come. In real life, the anchor might use a microphone to interview passers-by, all with a camera crew in town. When he used a Meta headset to visit a virtual-reality venue recently, Dokoupil brought producers with him, who used their line-of-sight with their own headsets as ersatz cameras to capture the conversations he had with other users.
The interviews “made me very convinced that this is the next big thing,” says Dokoupil, in a more traditional interview conducted via Zoom. “What was incredible was how quickly my brain stopped thinking about this as virtual reality and just took it as reality. It was just real.”
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“Mornings in the Metaverse” will debut tomorrow with a six-minute segment in which Dokoupil creates his own avatar and speaks with a philosophy professor about the potential of finding real meaning in a virtual world. Future pieces will come from Carter Evans, who explores the impact the metaverse is having on the entertainment and gaming industries, and Anna Werner, who examines potential dangers lurking in the metaverse and whether they will spur a need for regulations.
Producers have been considering the series for months, says Shawna Thomas, executive producer of “CBS Mornings,” after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, visited the program and discussed the company’s Oculus products. “That was a tiptoe toward it,” she says. “This is a frontier that has so many stories in it. It’s a money story. It’s a business story. It’s a generational story between our older viewers and our younger viewers. It’s a videogaming story. It’s an entertainment story.”
She expects the series may well continue beyond the initial segments producers have planned. “I suspect that we will get through these pieces and the segments and interviews we have, and that will lead us to more stories.”
A key element, she says, is making sure viewers can grasp the new concepts from the get go. “We have to try to make it understandable to our audience, because the world is going in this direction,” she says.
As part of his opener on Thursday, Dokoupil will spend some time showing viewers how digital communications have changed over the years. The internet was once “something you logged on to, and then it became something you take with you. If the metaverse comes to pass, it will be a thing you are immersed in,” he says.
