8. What can tech do?
• Capture data
– light as data e.g. angle of entry, non-visible
– GPS
• Process data
9. But why?
• Why else do we capture data?
– To understand more?
– Preserving history?
• More immersive experiences
• To see the whole story
• Deep linking
26. Flavours of VR
• Computational photography
– 360 panoramas, stills & video
– Rendered on Web & 3D devices
• Synthetic environments
– Recreating places using data
• Hybrid environments
31. Virtual reality football
Real-time data & media E.g. GPS, accelerometers, audio
+
Gaming engine E.g. FIFA 2015
=
Live VR matches & replay from any POV
32. Tool-Kit for Crafting an Interactive
Documentaries
http://wapo.st/afterthestorm
http://heliosdesignlabs.com/
• Movie making with code = interactive
• Photoshop, AE, FCP and code
33.
34. Virtual Reality Journalism?
• Nonny de la Peña
– http://www.immersivejournalism.com/
pushing technological boundaries for narrative
endeavors
What kind of things? All things tech and media – journalism, broadcast, web development, entertainment – games, movies, interactive, design, data, food tech
So every year, themes emerge. Last year it was UX and social media.
This year it seemed to be Storytelling and Big Data.
Storytelling from lots of angles – marketing, social media, journalism
Big Data – from the point of view of: we know about big data now, but what are we gong to do with it?part of that is to help Tell stories!
So I went to loads of sessions, some good, some bad. E.g Long-form session, they argued about the name longform for about 20 minutes! Wasn’t useful.
So here’s a selection of sessions and Ideas that made their mark on me.
Hans Peter Brondmo. Photographer, futurist and tech entrepreneur.
Cameras are getting better – but they are not evolving!
Historically: we’re capturing an image onto a fixed shaped medium. Cameras are better at doing that but that’s all they do!
constrained by so many things e.g. Camera box, lenses, megapixels, sensors etc.
And what do we get? Only part of the story! A tiny glimpse into a moment.
Better with moving images but they still have the same constraints – added is the extra cost of production.
So what is computational Photography?
Rather than capture flat images, we can capture data
What data does light have? Colours (OBV) but also angle of entry that helps determine how far away things are.
How does the hubble space telescope take images? It measures light over the full spectrum and crunches the data! It can tell us where things are, even hat they’re made of.
We’re not there yet with media, but we can do some useful things!
The tech can do this, why not use it!
So something useful – We’re already using computational photography.
What apps do you have that do more than just take pictures?
Well, you phones will capture Geo loaction data
Who’s this? What’s the ball?
And why not?
Are out memories that reliable?
The idea is simple: use devices to capture data (od interesting stuff) chuck it on the cloud and do stuff with it!
3D mapping for crime scenes?
Storytelling? Verification for a start, but also reconstructing images that have changed, that aren’t threre anymore or that are hard to get to.
Here’s an example..
MIT project – this example was put together by hand & Photoshop then ,formed the basis of processing algorithms to do the work for you!
What happens when you extend this? When data grows and becomes richer? When processing becomes better? When we can do this with video?
So I saw a series of sessions that were based around interactive and VR and they really grabbed me!
Most of these are just examples of the great stuff being done with tech and strortelling.
Based in the Netherland, these 3 guys talked about the stuff they were doing at Doclab
DocLab is to showcase interactive documentaries and other new digital artforms that succesfully push the boundaries of documentary storytelling
Talked about some of the interactive and immersive projects
Here’s the projects.
What do they they mean by interactive? The audience can interact either by touching or in the case of VR moving their heads.
Also in the way that they’re made e.g. Behind the blue screen was aimed at getting through censorship in Iran by using a special app to record video selfies. The app screens out their face and anonymises them.
Robots in residence – programmed little robots with cameras to go around interviewing people. They asked quite personal questions that were answered quite frankly- because they were cute robots!
Immersive experiences
Fully immersive – even emits smells!
An interactive performance installation allowing the user to enter the body and mind of another person.
based on low-budget experiments in virtual body extension
This starts to bring in an important aspect of storytelling – Empathy!
What’s happening is that each participant sees the other’s view.
So again, VR piqued my interest!
These guys gave us some useful ways anyone could get started with VR and immersive experiences
These are a few ways to approach VR..
VR is here. There are lots of ways of doing it!
The news screens..
These guys at Elevr make their own kit and experiment on the cheap!
The Web has **massive** implications –
Web VR - the power of web browsers such as Chrome means that 3D can be rendered on-demand in the browser.
Youtube support 360 video and DIY is easy too!
Here’s one I did earlier. Not video, but will work with the right goggles!
What about VR sports?
How much data is collected about sport?
How does Hawkeye work on the tennis?
What if we did this in realtime?? This is not beyond us!
This is more of a show and tell. A really nice interactive documentary made by Alabama filmmaker Andy Grace and Helios Labs in Canada.
What they wanted to get across was that so much can be done with traditional media making skills allied with interactivituy and web coding skills.
The usual film-making tools + code
To finish off – just to prove that VR is a real thing In journalism and there’s quite a buzz about it.
Nonny is a pioneer in VR journalism – her perspective is: we tell stories to help people understand and VR is a hugely powerful tool for this. It draws on empathy and creates REAL memories! (anf that’s scientific!)
Just to finish off, VICE are doing loads with VR, their aim is to provide live VR experiences via the web. But at the moment, there are too many techniucal constarints!
Spike Jonez