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.

Professor Pacheco reports on his experience with an extended HoloLens demo at the E3 conference and provides ideas on how it could be used in journalism and media.

Professor Pacheco is interviewed by a Swedish tech magazine about virtual reality journalism.

"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"

Prof. Pacheco predicts the future media-disrupting technologies for CommPRObiz: "Part of my job as the Peter Horvitz Chair in Journalism Innovation is to look on the horizon and identify trends that might lead the next waves of disruption. I also challenge my students to do field tests of disruptive technologies, then use what they learn to predict where things will be in another 5 years. Following are some trends I believe will uproot current media businesses and empower entirely new ones."

Columbia Journalism Review just listed the "Harvest of Change" virtual reality journalism project that Professor Pacheco co-produced at Gannett as one of 11 noteworthy journalism experiments today. BDJ senior, now graduated, also contributed as a developer.

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.

"Immersive journalism is picking up now in part because the necessary technology has gotten better, cheaper, and more portable. The smartphone's ability to stream high-definition video as well as its increasing popularity-58% of Americans had one as of January 2014, according to Pew Research-have further accelerated adoption. Add to that the more widespread use of interactive data visualizations and advances in wearable computing and the stage may be set for a more robust adoption of virtual reality. "It's not just the media coming to you," says Dan Pacheco, professor of journalism innovation at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. "You move into the media.""

Prof. Pacheco was invited to present with Nonny de la Peña about Virtual Reality Journalism at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy.

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.

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

"Dan Pacheco compared the news industry to Hollywood. "In the golden age of movies, the studio controlled everything, hired all of the actors in a company-town model," said Pacheco, "Now everyone is a free agent." While the sources themselves remain a big deal (Time, WSJ, The New York Times), "the journalist is increasingly the brand," noted Pacheco.  Just look at the incredible following new personalities now have on Twitter, due to its uniquely popular open forum."

Pacheco has visions of how the Oculus could be used in the future. Maps could be interactive and 3D, said Pacheco. Pacheco also said natural disaster stories would be perfect for the Oculus Rift, especially when it comes to flooding. He envisions a project where "you can dial in a city, go to one of the coastal areas of that city, and see what the water level is like now and see what it's like in 10, 20, 30 years." "That would be pretty powerful, because instead of reading about the possible effects of climate change, you're going to be in it," he said.

Professor Dan Pacheco's class at Newhouse had some fun before winter break by 3D scanning and printing "exact replicas" of their heads; a technology, according to Isaac Budmen, SU grad and co-author of "The Book on 3D Printing," that will permeate most every aspect of American homelife in the next two to three decades.

'For a couple of days in journalism circles, "Harvest of Change" was the hot trending topic. Never before had you been able to virtually step inside a story and be enveloped by 360-degree video and hyper-realistic 3D renderings of a landscape you could move inside of. And while the full effect was achieved through the Oculus headset, there were also 2D versions made for desktop computers, which let more people experience the story. You can find it at desmoinesregister.com/pages/interactives/harvest-of-change. The seeds of this "harvest" were planted when Dan Pacheco, chair of journalism innovation at the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University, met with Mitch Gelman, vice president of product at Gannett Digital. '

SU alum Joe Infantino gives the back story on the award-winning Pan Am 103 project he worked on in Professor Pacheco and Professor Jon Glass's Web Journalism and Innovation class.