Spotlight on Nonny de la Peña, Immersive Journalist
October 2, 2012
I first met Nonny de la Peña a few years ago through the Knight News Challenge. She’d just started her project Stroome, a collaborative video editing tool, and I was about to spin off my KNC project Printcasting into BookBrewer. Nonny is still running Stroome on the side, but has meanwhile taken up residence at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg as a fellow at the Cinematic Arts School.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOaCT7Kts64[/youtube]I ran into her at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco and was happy to see that she’s still plugging along, but even I couldn’t predict how incredibly cool her latest project is. Using virtual reality goggles, she can project you into a news story with audio from the actual event, and an incredibly realistic virtual environment and avatars that move around you in real time. You can get a sense for how it works in the 5-minute video above, but you really have to experience it to understand how transformative it is. Rather than reading about an event, or watching it on a monitor, you’re actually in it and reacting along with the other virtual witnesses around you.
Nonny has big plans for this technology, including theaters where people can buy a ticket to “ride” through a news story. After entering her first immersive project, which is about a food bank that was running out of food while an elderly man suffered a diabetic seizure, I give a high probability of success to her assertion that enterprising journalists will make a lot of money off traveling immersive VR shows.
She debuted her first project at the Sundance Film Festival, where she had 3-hour waiting lines and put 1,000 people through the experience. With interest like that, it’s not far-fetched to imagine a subset paying $10 each. Not only would that fund further development, but it would show that people will pay to walk a mile in someone else’s virtual shoes.
Newspaper sites are putting up paywalls in the hopes of getting people to pay for news, with limited success. Should they be setting up virtual news centers in shopping malls and selling tickets instead?
– Dan Pacheco
Professor Pacheco in the Press
Corazón del Barrio captures the importance of community engagement
Comments:
- Newhouse professor Daniel Pacheco and students from his virtual reality class visited La Casita Sept. 8 to film and photograph a group of dancers, led by Luz Encarnación. After a few hours, the students had taped enough footage to create a 3D virtual reality video...
CNN: Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash
Comments:
- Dan Pacheco, professor of practice and chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, has experienced the issue firsthand. As an online producer for the Post's website in the late 1990s and later for America Online, some of the work he helped build has disappeared...
How Microsoft's HoloLens 2 is bringing augmented reality to your job
Comments:
- “I think we will be seeing two camps: Microsoft and a few startups like Meta2 and Vuzix on the business end, and Magic Leap and Apple (when Apple releases its rumored glasses) on the consumer end,” Dan Pacheco, a professor of journalism and chair in journalism innovation at Syracuse University’s S...
Digiday: Despite limitations, publishers plot more augmented reality for 2019
Tags: no_tag
by: Dan Pacheco
5 Axes of Convergence that are Transforming the PR Industry - Nasdaq.com
Tags: no_tag
by: Dan Pacheco
The future of news: Professionals, students come to Newhouse for innovative drone journalism training | Newhouse School - Syracuse University
Tags: no_tag
by: Dan Pacheco
Dan Pacheco to Discuss ‘VR in Journalism’ at Virtual Reality Summit in Seoul June 28-29 | Virtual Reality Summit
Tags: no_tag
by: Dan Pacheco
An SU student startup uses virtual reality to read the news | The Daily Orange – The Independent Student Newspaper of Syracuse, New York
Tags: no_tag
by: Dan Pacheco
360° videos and VR: immersive journalism is here to stay? – – International Journalism Festival
Comments:
- Video of Dan Pacheco's panel on VR and 360 video for journalism at the 2017 International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. - Dan Pacheco
Tags:
Tags: no_tag by: Dan Pachecottps://medium.com/google-news-lab/announcing-the-google-news-lab-university-network-d1772a5bc007 - Google Search
Pizza, virtual reality and ethics intersect at Sundance Ignite On Tour | The Daily Orange – The Independent Student Newspaper of Syracuse, New York
Tags: no_tag
by: Dan Pacheco
Become a tree at this year’s Sundance Ignite On Tour | The Daily Orange – The Independent Student Newspaper of Syracuse, New York
Tags: no_tag
by: Dan Pacheco
Newhouse School to host drone journalism seminar | The Daily Orange – The Independent Student Newspaper of Syracuse, New York
Tags: no_tag
by: Dan Pacheco
2016 Mirror Awards Ceremony - YouTube
Comments:
- Nonny de la Peña had this to say about Professor Pacheco after her acceptance of an I-3 Mirror Award.
“Once the [Oculus] Facebook sale happened, $2 billion dollars, you’re not so nuts. But before that happened, a lot of people thought trying to do journalism in virtual reality was crazy...
Students, Faculty to Create Content for HoloLens Augmented Reality Headset
Comments:
- Prof. Dan Pacheco has been accepted into the HoloLens developer program and will work with Newhouse students and faculty to create content for the device. - Dan Pacheco
Tags:
Comments:Immersive journalism: What virtual reality means for the future of storytelling and empathy-casting - TechRepublic
http://storynext.gannett.com/state-of-vr.pdf
Comments:
- Prof. Pacheco co-authored the primer on virtual reality in this report on The State of Virtual Reality in Journalism for Gannett and the Knight Foundation. - Dan Pacheco