Group items tagged

Newhouse official coverage of the Future of Digital Media panel that kicked off the Newhouse school's Dick Clark Studios and Alan Gerry Center for Media Innovation.

The Des Moines Register's Harvest of Change, which was the first project to incorporate virtual reality in a commercial news setting, has won a prestigious Edward R. Murrow award. This emerged from Professor Dan Pacheco working as an innovator in residence at Gannett Digital, where he brought an Oculus Rift and knowledge of how to create VR experiences in Unity.

"Dan Pacheco, the journalism innovation chair at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, came on board this summer as Gannett Digital's innovator in residence to work on the project. There is huge potential for virtual reality experiences even outside journalism, he says. "When the next great Lexus car comes out or some kind of hybrid or even Tesla, these brands can begin to stop telling people about how cool their cars are. They're going to say, 'Jump inside. Take it for a virtual test drive.' People will do that," Pacheco said."

"... student journalists from the Newhouse School-who will discuss news engagement with people across campus; demos of Oculus Rift, 3D scanning, DJI Phantom drone and Google Glass with Dan Pacheco, chair of journalism innovation at the Newhouse School ..."

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.

"Dan Pacheco, chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University, presented a session showing off the virtual reality display in the Midway. Gannett is using Oculus Rift head-mounted devices for experiments in explanatory journalism. The devices - which cover the top of one's head and face - don't make viewers seasick these days, and the visual experience is stunning."

Prof. Pacheco co-authored the primer on virtual reality in this report on The State of Virtual Reality in Journalism for Gannett and the Knight Foundation.

"There's a virtual reality course being taught this semester in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications called Virtual Reality Storytelling. (Full disclosure: I am taking the course right now. It's awesome.) The course's professor, Dan Pacheco, says demand for the course is high, and for good reason in that it may set you apart in a job interview. "Just having a good understanding of [virtual reality], especially for students in communications who want to work within media is going to be very marketable," Pacheco said. "Every major media company right now is investing in virtual reality.""

"I think we will be seeing two camps: Microsoft and a few startups like Meta2 and Vuzix on the business end, and Magic Leap and Apple (when Apple releases its rumored glasses) on the consumer end," Dan Pacheco, a professor of journalism and chair in journalism innovation at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications explained via email. "In the middle is Google,"-which, he added, has invested in Magic Leap.

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."

Video of Dan Pacheco's panel on VR and 360 video for journalism at the 2017 International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.

The December issue of News Pro magazine (page 16 in print magazine) has a story about Horvitz Endowed Chair Dan Pacheco's Kick it Up crowdfunding program: Match Game: Syracuse University Initiative Supports Crowdfunding.

This story about Kick it Up was published just as the first Newhouse-backed student Kickstarter campaign was funded.

Newhouse site story about participation in Chancellor's inauguration panel on the future of the university.

"Dan Pacheco, who is chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University and who consulted to Gannett on the Oculus Rift project, said the barriers to scaling these ideas aren't technological (the tools are there and free to use), but the finding the right stories and people with the right skill sets."

"Students in Pacheco's VR Storytelling course (http://vrstorytelling.org), most of whom have no 3D modeling experience, use Mixamo to easily and inexpensively add interactive characters to scenes that are viewed in Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets"

Newhouse currently teaches interactive data visualization, product management for journalists, and new technologies for new media as part of the pack, said chair in journalism innovation Dan Pacheco.