Viewing the Future? Virtual Reality In Journalism

Journalism underwent a flurry of virtual reality content creation, production and distribution starting in the final months of 2015. The New York Times distributed more than 1 million cardboard virtual reality viewers and released an app showing a spherical video short about displaced refugees. The Los Angeles Times landed people next to a crater on Mars. USA TODAY took visitors on a ride-along in the "Back to the Future" car on the Universal Studios lot and on a spin through Old Havana in a bright pink '57 Ford. ABC News went to North Korea for a spherical view of a military parade and to Syria to see artifacts threatened by war. The Emblematic Group, a company that creates virtual reality content, followed a woman navigating a gauntlet of anti- abortion demonstrators at a family planning clinic and allowed people to witness a murder-suicide stemming from domestic violence.In short, the period from October 2015 through February 2016 was one of significant experimentation with virtual reality (VR) storytelling. These efforts are part of an initial foray into determining whether VR is a feasible way to present news. The year 2016 is shaping up as a period of further testing and careful monitoring of potential growth in the use of virtual reality among consumers

Their memory:exploring veterans’ voices, virtual reality and collective memory

This paper focuses on the virtual reality (VR) project Their Memory and details the development and evaluation of virtual reality environments and experiences with respect to its impact on young people (14-35 demographic) with the narratives of veterans in Scotland. As part of the AHRC Immersive Experiences program, Their Memory was created to explore how game design techniques and immersive technology could be used to enhance existing historical research and enrich narratives to bring expansive experiences to hard-to-reach audiences. The project worked directly with the veterans’ charity, Poppyscotland, to create an environment and experience that would resonate with new audiences, and explore documentary and storytelling techniques for the commemoration of war and conflict. The design of the project evolved through co-design sessions with veterans and young people and culminated in the creation of a short, thought-provoking, narrative-driven experience. The VR experience enabled players to connect with the memories of veterans in Scotland and exploring the different conflicts or situations they experienced and how they make sense of them. The project brought together cross-sector expertise to research how immersive experiences can help memory-based organizations in engaging with wider audiences, raise awareness, and diversify current learning outputs. The paper details the design and development of the Virtual Reality project, through co-design, and how this engaged the audience and evolved the experience created. The paper includes a summative evaluation of events conducted with schoolchildren to assess the project and concludes with how the project evidences impact upon audiences and the potential for both technology and the experience

Gamification of sports media coverage: an infotainment approach to Olympics and Football World Cups

Sports media coverage of mega-events is partly oriented to gamification, the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-gaming contexts. This infotainment approach to events has been developed by media outlets as an original and effective way to capture wider audience attention and to place events in context before a competition starts. This article examines 28 gamified sports pieces developed by media outlets from seven countries during the last two Olympics (2016 Summer Olympics in Rio and 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang) and Football World Cups (2014 in Brazil and 2018 in Russia). This sample comprises two categories following Ferrer-Conill (2015): “gamified pieces” (game like elements that are part of a bigger interactive feature) and “newsgames” (more sophisticated pieces often included in complex graphics or multimedia content). The results show that, despite its entertaining formula, gamification serves mainly informational purposes and adds value to sports coverage. Especially in the Summer and Winter Olympics, gamified sports pieces tend to be explanatory and data-driven in order to inform the audience about nonmainstream sports

Immersive Journalism as Storytelling

"This book sets out cutting-edge new research and examines future prospects on 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) in journalism, analyzing and discussing virtual world experiments from a range of perspectives. Featuring contributions from a diverse range of scholars, Immersive Journalism as Storytelling highlights both the opportunities and the challenges presented by this form of storytelling. The book discusses how immersive journalism has the potential to reach new audiences, change the way stories are told, and provide more interactivity within the news industry. Aside from generating deeper emotional reactions and global perspectives, the book demonstrates how it can also diversify and upskill the news industry. Further contributions address the challenges, examining how immersive storytelling calls for reassessing issues of journalism ethics and truthfulness, transparency, privacy, manipulation, and surveillance, and questioning what it means to cover reality when a story is told in virtual reality. Chapters are grounded in empirical data such as content analyses and expert interviews, alongside insightful case studies that discuss Euronews, Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria, and The New York Times’ NYTVR application. This book is written for journalism teachers, educators, and students, as well as scholars, politicians, lawmakers, and citizens with an interest in emerging technologies for media practice.

The power of immersive technologies: a sociopsychological analysis of the relationship between immersive environments, storytelling, sentiment, and the impact on user experience

This dissertation initially focused on exploring the potential of immersive technologies for the distant future. However, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus in late 2019 disrupted the world, causing a pause in many areas. Nevertheless, the butterfly effect of the pandemic spurred the development of immersive technologies, resulting in the rise of the metaverse, web3, non-fungible tokens (NFT), and avatars, which are gaining increasing popularity. The excitement for the metaverse is growing in both academia and industry, leading to new avenues of research, digital marketing, video games, tourism, and social media. This dissertation explores this rapidly emerging technological revolution and its effects on user experience (UX)

Virtual Reality, 360⁰ Video, and Journalism Studies: Conceptual Approaches to Immersive Technologies

A growing number of newsrooms are experimenting with Virtual Reality (VR) and other immersive storytelling techniques, typically supported by technology companies that see journalism as a potential vehicle for taking VR mainstream. The resulting pieces have been wide-ranging in topic, style, and scope, but all introduce new complexities to journalistic norms and practices. To date, however, journalism studies scholars have conducted relatively little research into these immersive technologies. This essay proposes three conceptual approaches to examining VR journalism: Actor-Network Theory, normative theory, and a sociological perspective on journalistic work

Spatial audio and immersive journalism: production, narrative design, and sense of presence

This article presents the findings from an experimental study on the use of binaural audio in two long-form journalistic features broadcast on Portuguese radio. From a production and narrative design perspective, our objective is to examine whether/how binaural audio implies a transformation of previously established news radio production work principles and practices, as well as of storytelling ideation and techniques. From a user experience viewpoint, we examine whether the use of binaural audio translates into higher levels of self-reported immersion and place illusion (n = 77). Despite the spread of new audio journalism formats, media and communication studies have until now largely neglected the role of spatial audio in the construction of immersion and the illusion of place. We argue that this epistemic omission translates into an image-centric conception and operationalization of the immersive journalism proposal, which stands out as a knowledge gap regarding the work of journalistic storytellers and relating to participants’ actual experience. The original contribution of this article is threefold: (1) conceptual, by broadening the perspective of journalism studies’ scholars and media professionals on the concept of immersive journalism, which, in our view, is often incorrectly considered to be synonymous with that of virtual reality journalism; (2) practical, by generating a more nuanced understanding of how actual practitioners perceive and employ immersive journalism; (3) phenomenological, by developing an examination of the factors that influence listeners’ ultimate perception of the immersive experience

Immersive Journalism: Advantages, Disadvantages and Challenges from the Perspective of Experts

The aim of this text is to analyze the future of immersive journalism from the perspective of experts now, in a moment when the initial experimental stage seems to have passed given the smaller number of pieces being today produced by leading media. To do this, we conducted two focus groups with 15 international leaders in the field, including both professional and academic points of view. We asked them about the main strengths, weaknesses, challenges and how to overcome them so that immersive journalism has continuity in the future. The results reveal few differences between the views of academics and practitioners, especially regarding the strengths and weaknesses of this new narrative, which is as versatile as it is complex. Most of them agree that immersive journalism is still in its experimentation stage regarding its production, although there is a positive perspective regarding the sustainability of this format in the near future. Both groups agree on the need to continue testing to understand this new narrative language and insist on the need to introduce this knowledge into journalism schools, both theoretically and practically.This work has been supported by the Madrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid-Spain) under the Multiannual Agreement with UC3M in the line of Excellence of University Professors (EPUC3MXX), and in the context of the V PRICIT (Regional Programme of Research and Technological Innovation)