JOVRNALISM

What’s Happening in the VR and AR world?

March 5, 2019• Blog

Feb. 26, 2019

Sketch Fab is an online marketplace and community that makes it easy for people to find and publish 3-Dimensional content to the web. The company, which started in Paris, began because its creators were frustrated by the lack of mediums that existed for people to share their 3D models with friends. Hours of labor would be spent creating 3D models with no way of fully sharing them. Due to this demand within the VR and AR markets, Sketch Fab has now grown to have over 2 million registered users, 2 million 3D models, 8 million monthly visitors, and 1 billion page views since its launch.

The community is made up of all kinds of users, from designers and architects, to game studios and schools. Sketch Fab’s goal is to eventually turn 3D into a mainstream format. What makes this platform exiting for JOVRNALISM, is that Sketch Fab allows creators to showcase their models to millions of users instantly. Therefore, students can take their 3D models that they produce throughout the semester, and display them for the world to see! To learn more about this marketplace, click here.

Snapchat Lens Studio Lesson

Feb. 19, 2019
Did you know that you don’t have to be a technology guru or expert to be able to create one-of-a-kind Snapchat lens filters? JOVRNALISM has been using Snapchat filters as a mechanism to bring stories to life over the past few semesters. Snapchat’s augmented reality platform is especially useful because it allows creators to import artwork and publish the lens link directly to the web, so that anyone who has access to the code is able to instantly see the filter through the app.

As part of JOVRNALISM Spring 2019 curriculum, students were required to learn how to use the interface of Snapchat Lens Studio so they too can create unique, enticing visual filters. Taught by a JOVRNALISM alumni, Chiat, who happens to be a Snapchat Lens Studio superstar, each student in class produced a filter that was approved and published to the web. Over the course of the semester, students will be working on projects that use interactive Snapchat lenses to showcase the realities of climate change, environmental sustainability, and more.

To follow along on more projects like this, be sure to follow @JOVRNALISM on Instagram!
Thank you again for the class lesson, Chiat!

Insights when taking a Magic Leap

February 21, 2019• Blog, News

The Fall 2018 JOVRNALISM (JOURN 489) class had a special guest lecturer earlier in the semester: Rony Abovitz, the CEO of Magic Leap, one of the most talked about companies in the emerging Mixed Reality (they call it Spatial Computing) industry.

On the heels of the much anticipated LEAPcon event, Abovitz didn’t just Skype into the class, he “beamed” in via a telepresence robot shipped from Plantation, FL, the company’s headquarters. (more…)

JOVRNALISM & The Wrigley Institute

February 12, 2019• Blog, Class, Project

This past week, JOVRNALISM traveled to Catalina Island to visit the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. The institute, which is an extension of USC Dornsife College of Letters and Sciences, researches different ways to implement environmental sustainability into everyday life.

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JOVRNALISM launches Homeless Realities

February 11, 2019• Blog, News, Project

Members of the homeless community and JOVRNALISM students collaborated to tell immersive stories about life on the streets of Los Angeles.

The project combined 360 videos, drones and photogrammetry to produce immersive experiences including augmented reality via Snapchat.

Launch the project site: http://homelessrealities.jovrnalism.io/

AR Journalism: Homeless Realities AR experiences

February 11, 2019• Uncategorized

Using Snapchat’s Lens Studio, JOVRNALISM created augmented reality experiences about homelessness in Los Angeles and made the accessible through Snapchat.
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EVENT: Homeless Realities premieres at LA Central Library

February 1, 2019• Class, Community, Events, News

Our Homeless Realities project, produced by the Fall 2018 class, will be debuting at a public event held Saturday, February 16 at the Central Library in Downtown Los Angeles.

The event, which starts at 2PM, will not only feature the diverse and innovative experiences, but will also have a panel discussion with the students and the homeless participants that produced the stories.

The entire project will also launch across all the JOVRNALISM platforms, including on a project site: http://homelessrealities.jovrnalism.io

To learn more about the project, including the training the class offered the community, read this story by USC Annenberg.

Democratizing VR: JOVRNALISM Pop-Ups

October 30, 2018• News

In 2017, JOVRNALISM took on the challenge to tell VR stories of the local community to the community and make the high-tech produced content easily accessible, and was selected as one of the award winners of Online News Association’s Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education. Led by USC Professor Robert Hernandez, JOVRNALISM is working to democratize emerging technologies such as AR/VR and photogrammetry and their use in non-fiction storytelling.

That’s why if you attended one of KCRW’s Summer Nights’ Backyard Party series or Gustavo’s Great Tortilla Tournament you might have noticed one booth in the midst of sizzling grills and thirst-quenching beverages that had the longest lines. And no, it wasn’t the food truck. To make high-tech stories more accessible to the general public, JOVRNALISM launched pop-up demos for their immersive documentaries such as the Online Journalism Awards nominee The Deported: Life Beyond the Border.

Throughout the events, JOVRNALISM immersed attendees of all ages and backgrounds in experiences around the world from Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea to the life of the deported beyond the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico. The immersive experiences were produced solely by students who not only had to travel to these destinations but also swiftly learn how to utilize brand-new technologies they had never used before.

Though most of the developed content has been successfully published by media giants such as NPR and get nominated for awards, JOVRNALISM is just getting started. In its seventh semester, students of this hackathon-type class are covering homelessness in Los Angeles County and will produce content to tackle one of the biggest social issues in their area.

JOVRNALISM’s efforts to democratize high-tech stories go beyond demoing what has already been produced. Fall 2018 semester students will lead a hands-on immersive video training session for individuals experiencing homelessness. Held at LA’s Central Library, the free two-day workshop will teach members of the homeless community how to use 360 video/VR technologies and hope to empower them to tell their own stories. In collaboration with Al Jazeera’s Contrast VR, JOVRNALISM will gift Samsung Gear 360 cameras to the participants and offer additional training to help finish the production for those that want to. Al Jazeera’s Contrast VR aims at publishing first-person stories from under-represented communities.

To find out about what’s to come, follow @thejovrnalism on Twitter, @jovrnalism on Instagram, and download our application on Google Play, Apple App Store, and Oculus.

Drawing the Border

September 25, 2018• How To, Project

Note: This post originally published on August 11, 2018, on the Journalism 360 Medium site: https://medium.com/journalism360/drawing-the-border-6f13316e9065

To tell the story of the deported in Tijuana is to truly illustrate a new, unfamiliar reality. Just a few miles from San Diego, Tijuana may not seem immediately different from any American metropolis.

Most cities take shape similarly: they have concentrations of large buildings and concrete paths; plazas will restaurants and office spaces alike; developed districts and rougher parts; and cars and people, and therefore traffic.

On the surface, Tijuana felt familiar.

If you want to read more about this process, go here.

Profiling Soft Power

May 3, 2018• News, Project

Inspired by the success from our Winter Olympics coverage, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy again approached JOVRNALISM for another collaboration. This time the focus was about a new play called Soft Power, that was coming to Los Angeles.
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JOVRNALISM captures the migrant caravan in 360

April 29, 2018• News

Despite the semester being over and facing final exams, Reina Akamatsu, Raja Venkatapathy Mani and Prof. Robert Hernandez headed south of the border in the early hours to capture the caravan of migrants that had walked from Central America in hopes of seeking asylum in the United States.
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