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."

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.""

Professor Pacheco has been added to the advisory board for StoryNEXT, a new annual conference focused on innovators in virtual reality storytelling.

""The more difficult and complicated the subject, the more we seem to want to close the news app and open up Candy Crush," said Daniel Pacheco, a journalism professor at Syracuse University who specializes in VR storytelling. "VR can counteract this tendency because of its ability make you feel physically present somewhere and to comprehend information by exploring it in an almost physical way. It's hard to tune out or forget something you experienced as if you were there." Great storytelling is evocative and with VR can transport the viewer into another, time, place, and mindset complete with a range of emotions. Take Waves of Grace, a documentary on Liberia's Ebola crisis and how one woman used her immunity to help children orphaned by the disease's spread in 2014. The documentary's co-creator Chris Milk used 360-video to capture the protagonist's, Decontee Davis, surroundings - sights and sounds that put the viewer in the midst of an epidemic. "You relate differently to every other story you read about pandemic disease. Why? Because after that you feel like you were there, as if you stood inside an Ebola clinic while a dying victim was being treated and comforted. It can almost feel like one of your own memories," Pacheco said. "This ability to transport people's consciousness somewhere else is so powerful that I have no doubt it will change the way people relate to issues in the news.""

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.

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

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."