Prof Pacheco Press

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."

Dan Pacheco, professor of practice and chair of journalism innovation at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, has experienced the issue firsthand. As an online producer for the Post's website in the late 1990s and later for America Online, some of the work he helped build has disappeared. "This is really about the problem of what I call the boneyard of the internet. Everything that's not a piece of text or a flat picture is basically destined to rot and die when new methods of delivering the content replace it," Pacheco told CNN Business. "I just feel like the internet is rotting at an even faster pace, ironically, because of innovation. It shouldn't."

"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.

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

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."

Prof. Dan Pacheco has been accepted into the HoloLens developer program and will work with Newhouse students and faculty to create content for the device.

Prof. Pacheco was interviewed by CBS Interactive's TechRepublic about using virtuality for journalism in the story: "Immersive journalism: What virtual reality means for the future of storytelling and empathy-casting." The piece also referenced Pacheco's Virtual Reality Storytelling course and included a link to a 360 video of the SU football team by class member and football player Eric Jackson.

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.