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Creating Your First VR Experience Practical tips for getting started in VR using freely available software and 3D assets. Prof. Dan Pacheco will draw upon material from his Virtual Reality Storytelling class at the S.I. Newhouse School to provide practical steps for creating interactive scenes in Unity3D that can be exported for web and the Oculus Rift. This will include demos and a deep-dive into Harvest of Change, the virtual reality journalism project he managed for The Des Moines Register and Gannett Digital, and some of the final projects from students in VR Storytelling. In addition, he will bring a 360° GoPro camera rig and stitching software to demonstrate how 360° videos can be produced and loaded onto the Samsung GearVR and into Unity3D VR environments.

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. But there's somebody in this room who didn't. And this is really important about why innovation is crucial in journalism schools. Not only did that Hunger project start at the USC school of journalism, but a really important person here put on the goggles -- we both had been Knight Grant winners earlier -- Dan Pacheco. And he said, 'Holy shit, there's something real here.' And he invited me up to S.I. Newhouse. At that point I'm carrying 22 motion tracking cameras, huge tripods, crazy equipment, I show up with the flu and 103 degree fever. Something had broken in transport and Dan and I worked until midnight until finally one person in the lab instructed me, and I managed to fix it with a paper clip. And then the next day, Syracuse students were introduced to virtual reality. But something else happened. Dan went on to work at Gannett. He then got them interested in virtual reality. And then Gannett and USA Today began their thrust. Because of Dan's interests, S.I. Newhouse became the very first school to offer an immersive journalism class. And because of Dan's support of this medium, a lot more … many many many new minds were opened to using VR for journalism. So really in many ways, the fact that I'm here is down to having somebody like Dan Pacheco be one of the very first people in my entire trajectory to say to me, hang on, there's something real here. So, you know, I really have to thank him, and I have to thank S.I. Newhouse because I don't know if I would have had the type of trajectory I have without what happened at your school. So thank you so, so much."

Syracuse.com asked Professor Pacheco for his predictions about future technologies over the next 5 to 20 years.

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. "What I like about the 360 medium for something like that is that you're right there with the artists," Pacheco said. "And, a lot of the time these things are done on a stage and there's a lot of distance between you (and the dancers). In this case, that entire dance is circular in nature, and so we put a camera right in the middle."