44 GENIUS INTERVIEW Nonny de la Peña
FEED: Do you see VR and immersive technologies being rolled out in a much broader way in the future, becoming a regular part of a newsroom’s production? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Absolutely. USA Today won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Trump border wall project, which included VR. I was giving a talk last week and there was Hans Zimmer, who is a very famous film composer. He was in front of me as we were being introduced before I went on stage. He said: ‘Film was the 20th-century medium. VR is the 21st-century medium. It’s the medium of the future’. And that’s for sure. It’s just a matter of how it’s unrolled. And that’s why we built the Reach platform to make it really easy for people to make news content and distribute it. There is still the problem of headsets, but back in 2010, I was working at University of Southern California as a research fellow, and there was a project that brought journalism students, business school students and engineering students together to try to create an app for news organisations. There was resistance to building anything for a smartphone. It was like, ‘Nobody has a smartphone. Why would you ever build a thing for a smartphone?’ Within a few years, there was no longer any obstacle to building a journalism platform on a phone. I think we’ll see something in the future where AR glasses, VR glasses and your phone will converge. FEED: Is news and journalism the killer app for VR? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: For me and you, since we’re both interested in journalism, probably. For many folks, they’re probably looking for an entertainment app or a game app. But gamers are growing up, and they’re going to expect their immersive content to go across all the media, from games to journalism. I think that’s going to be the expected. They’re going to want their entertainment, their news, their
games, etc in an immersive format. The world isn’t flat, so why should media stick to being flat? FEED: Can you tell us more about Emblematic’s new online platform? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: It’s called Reach.Love. The point of creating that platform was that we had worked with Spectrum News and launched the piece on the National Butterfly Center at South By Southwest. And we wanted to start helping these organisations make pieces that were otherwise previously too expensive or difficult to produce. We wanted to make the technology more accessible. We got a grant from the Knight Foundation because it’s also interested in seeing new methods of journalism made available. Right now, to make VR you have to learn C# and game engines, and we wanted to eliminate that. Anyone can go to the Reach.Love beta and play around. The whole point of the website is to make it easy for people to make VR. You
can grab all kinds of pre-made, and pull in 3D assets straight from other sites like Sketchfab, and assemble the components and actually make your VR story. FEED: How do you see the world of VR developing? NONNY DE LA PEÑA: Our whole world is being captured in volume. Phones have two cameras on the back now so they can capture things in depth, so that they can capture the steps. And these tools are becoming more commonplace as a way of displaying our world with added volume. On a 3D asset site, such as Sketchfab, you can find a 3D model of absolutely anything. More and more people are putting things out, so objects are represented as they are rather than with flat photographs. To me, there are certain ethical questions that start coming up in VR. Because everything’s going to be captured with depth, are we going to let people see the bodies when we capture a bomb going off, or a disaster? Those are the ethical questions that we’re going to have to figure out. How do we tell these intense stories and have some kind of editorial stance that’s ethical and appropriate when our world can be fully captured with depth? FEED: Because VR has the power to really immerse people in a situation, and the messaging is potentially much more powerful, is there a question
WE HAVE TO TEACH CRITICAL THINKING. WE NEED TOMAKE SURE THATWE HAVE AUTHENTIC SOURCES THATWE CAN TRUST
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