RH: Hello everyone. I want to start our course intro to immersive journalism by first taking a moment to reflect on how we got here. I want to arm you with information that will allow you to understand the context of where we are. How virtual reality became hype to actually being here. So I like to set the table and I use slides from a colleague named Mark Billinghurst to talk about Google Glass and other devices. He uses the narrative of a clock. If you think about it. The clock, when it first came out, was a big piece of equipment that was really expensive and there was only one per town. Put in the middle of the plaza so we can all benefit from it. Over time the clock pieces became smaller and cheaper, got more functions and evolved from being in the middle of town to the middle of your living room to your desktop and eventually onto your body. That narrative might sound familiar. When we think about computers: going from a mainframe that took up an entire room, to smaller computers, desktop, laptops and eventually your pocket. Smaller, cheaper more functions, and it became more intimate. I want you to keep that in mind as we talk about how we got here. Now I also want you to keep in mind at how the adoption rate for technology has changed over the years for a moment. I want you to think about how many years do you think it took for radio to reach fifty million users. What about TV? Or internet? Well here's the answer. It took radio thirty eight years to reach fifty million users. TV was less than half of that. Internet four years. The ipod three. Facebook two. And in nine months iphones downloaded one billion apps. So this slide is to show you we adopt in use technology at a much faster rate. Let me give you another example, think of Pokemon GO. That technology, that game, came out and we jumped to use it. Think of the Apple Watch and smart watches or a Fitbit or when the tablet first came out. We adopt new technology, often without thinking, but we adopted quickly incorporate it into our lives. We also remove the technology if it doesn't work for us. But we adopt it at a much quicker rate than ever before. And we see that with the mobile phone. The mobile phone is quite honestly the most widely adopted piece of equipment in our lifetime, in humanity. This is my favorite statistic that I always share: ninety one percent of Americans have their mobile device within arm's reach twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Now I have found, as I've spoken to around the world, I have found that this is a global phenomenon. Chances are you woke up this morning with an alarm clock going off on your phone. It is the first thing you look at when you wake up. It is the last thing you look up when you go to sleep. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. It's just our reality. There are more mobile
phones in this world than there are toothbrushes. The UN did a study where they found that more people have access to mobile phones than they have access to a working toilet. Mobile devices are integrated across the world regardless of your economic status. It's just part of our lives. And that changes so many aspects of our lives including how we capture historical moments. This is a screenshot of a periscope live video of a woman who captured a shooting happening in downtown Dallas. There are so many examples. The Brussels terrorist attack. Here's another one where Diamond Reynolds turned to Facebook live moments after her boyfriend was shot by the police. Mobile is everywhere and we use it. We use it in every aspect. And here's another example: in two thousand and thirteen the Boston Marathon bombing, a terrorist attack during the Boston Marathon. This person captured the second explosion in a photo and tweeted out. This is David Greene, he was there as well. He was fleeing the scene and think about this. As he was running away, he stopped turned around took a photo put it on Facebook. Again, I'm not saying it's right or wrong it just is. We all know this. The authorities knew that as well, so they asked people to review their photos to help them find suspects they were looking for. They would look at his photo and lo and behold they found the younger brother of the person who committed the atrocity. It's a chilling photo. I show this photo not only for that but because, what is this young lady holding? She's holding onto her phone. That device that connects us to each other all around the world. It is a computer. It is a radio. It is a television. It is a newspaper. It is everything in one. And so it is the most essential device for the media consumer and it is the most important piece of equipment for a modern journalist. That means we are in a mobile first era. We use and turn to our mobile devices over any other piece of equipment in our lives. Keep that in mind because again looking at that narrative. What is next? What would be the natural next evolutionary step? Mark talked about perhaps Google Glass, that wearable device that as we know now didn't work out. But the question is still valid. What will change between what will be next after the desktop, laptop, smartphone? We may not know but I will argue that the content on that device regardless of the form factor will fall into the augmented and virtual reality devices. That's why we're here taking this course. Now let's take a moment to talk about virtual reality and define that. Virtual reality is when you leave this current reality and immerse yourself in another. You often do that with a head mounted display, HMD, that shuts you off from the current physical world and ports you into another immersed world, but one where you can interact with, walk around in, at some point
maybe smell and taste. But there's technology now that allows you to touch, right. That is virtual reality. You leave this reality and you enter another. Augmented reality is slightly different. Augmented reality is, you stay in this reality but digital assets are overlaid to enhance your reality, right. One takes me away, I shut out the rest of the world. The other, I stay in this world and I interact with it. Now virtual reality often is an idea that came from Star Trek, the holodeck. We've all had dreams of walking around in this virtual world and in an immersive video game. It's been written up in books like Snow Crash, which I recommend. Or Ready Player One, which is a really fun read and I hear is turning into a movie. it's been in Hollywood, in the hype, and promised in terms of the virtual boy or a virtual glove or a head mounted display. All these things for decades, upon decades, upon decades, of saying the technology had arrived and really it hadn t. It was very clunky. It s graphics were poor. People got nauseous. And it never delivered. Until the Oculus Rift. This device is the device that really saved an industry that was very much dismissed and ignored for decades because it had a series of broken promises. And this device was created by this young man Palmer Luckey. Palmer Luckey, just so you know, was a journalism student in Long Beach and he dropped out to come to the University of Southern California to work at the MxR Lab. A lab to work on these devices and from there he worked on and created the Oculus Rift. He did a Kickstarter and eventually the Oculus was bought by Facebook for two billion dollars. They now have controllers called The Touch and I've tried different headsets and different controllers and I can tell you The Touch is pretty phenomenal. It is your natural hand gestures to interact with a virtual world. It's fantastic. If you can try it it's worth the wait to go experiment with it. It's fantastic. Now that history of virtual reality has gone through a lot of things and if you want to read and learn more about the history of that in-depth, I recommend this Verge piece that really documented how we got to the Oculus Rift. Now remember, Mark envisioned the Google Glass being the dominant device. Well one of the reasons out of many, while Google Glass didn't work out, was because it was the only wearable out there. That's not the case when it comes to virtual reality. Here we have the Oculus Rift but it's not alone. There's the HTC Vive or the Playstation VR. These are HMDs, head mounted displays, they cost a little bit of money, a couple of hundred dollars up to eight hundred dollars, to create these immersive experiences. But those aren't the only ones. Google came out with something called Google Cardboard, that's in the lower left hand corner with a piece of cardboard and plastic lenses, you can convert your phone into a head mounted display. And it works, even though it's just a piece of
cardboard you immerse yourself into one of the world. And there's a lot of different headsets that have come along. Right below the Oculus is the Microsoft Pala lens. This is mixed reality. So augmented reality, it overlays digital assets into your real world. But going back to virtual reality in the upper left hand corner, the white headset, there is Samsung Gear. Samsung partnered up with the Oculus Rift and created an affordable headset that takes a Samsung phone snaps it into this device and really does a phenomenal job to be an immersive headset. One of my favorite devices is a piece of plastic inspired by The View Master, the toy that was first was released in nineteen thirty that we may have played with as a kid. You put the disk in the device and click through photos. Well here, you put your phone into the device and you immerse yourself in virtual reality. Now there's software to create VR. This is software for three-d models, C.G., computer graphics, and what the platform is is a gaming engine. The most dominant ones are unreal and unity. What you do normally with these platforms is create virtual worlds for video games. But these platforms have been nimble and have evolved and you can now produce virtual reality and augmented reality in these spaces. Unity has been really fantastic and you can actually download unity for free, under a personal license and build actual experiences there. You should try it out. There's a lot of tutorials online. And what you need to do with unity or unreal is bring three-d models, the digital assets. You can create those three-d models using Maya or cinema four-d or you can buy them. There are some models that you can use for free, that you can bring into your virtual worlds and create these experiences. Now let's be honest this is not a common experience, a common skill set that we have in newsrooms. So this is true virtual reality but a lot of us don't have access to that but we do have access to this. Three-sixty videos. These are cameras of variety of different price points that allow you to do three-sixty videos that can be viewed immersively. A lot of people argue that three-sixty video isn't virtual reality. And they're right. It's not true virtual reality, but it's immersive content in the news consumer, the consumer of these experiences are not going to care care what you call it. It's just really powerful experiences. And they're done by cameras, like the what cameras on the bottom are really high end ones that range of forty, five thousand dollars to sixty thousand to the john cam camera that I don't even know how much it costs. Those are not for us. But the cameras on top with the Gopros. Those are the Gopro rigs that are made accessible for people like you and I to do high end production. But you don't need to a Go necessarily high end. Those cameras range from thirty five hundred dollars to five thousand dollars. But the other cameras go for or two hundred dollars to three hundred dollars. We'll look at these cameras closely in another video. But these cameras, this software which I'll talk
about later, and these headsets, all together create this new ecosystem for immersive content. Virtual reality, three-sixty, it doesn't matter. It's immersive. So it's not just the Oculus but it's a whole ecosystem, a whole industry. And the entry point for a content creator or a consumer of this content is very affordable or really expensive Think about how you can watch a video or a movie, you can go to a high end theater like the IMAX or you can watch a movie on your phone on You Tube. That is the spectrum that we're talking about when we're thinking about immersive content. You can learn more about these equipments and resources at my tipsheet and of course we're going to explore a lot of these things together in these future videos. VR is a variety of different form factors goals for marketing, video games, movies, but what is next? I want to go back to augmented reality because remember what we said at the very beginning: we re in a mobile first world. So one could argue Virtual Reality is not the end-all. Why would I limit myself in virtual reality? Lock myself in a room and not really go out into the world? Well that s where augmented reality will come into play. But to get there, we need to understand virtual reality and we can create these experiences now. Virtual reality is more accessible than augmented reality for many people. But again you gotta think about the content. What will journalism be like in these platforms and whatever form factor we're going to come up with, remember this old saying content is king. So it's not about the technology. It's certainly not about the device, that's the Google glass thing.it's about the content. They need, consumers need compelling content to justify them using these new emerging technologies and that's why I believe we have an incredible role here. We need to create content that is optimized for the user and these new devices. We know that a good story is a good story. When you read something or hear a radio piece or watch a video piece. You can get goosebumps. Because a good story is a good story regardless of format or technology. But with this new technology, we need to experiment. We need to find out what is a good story, and we're often going to fail in order to find what makes compelling content. But we have to. We have to try that out. And in the next videos, we'll look at VR journalism and other experiences that are available today.