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/
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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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.
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.
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.
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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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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While we read the headlines and hear the news stories, what happens to someone when they get deported from the United States and are sent to Mexico, a country that many deportees don’t know or speak the language?
What threats do they face when they walk into Tijuana, Mexico? Where can they go and who can they turn to for help? What unknown threats do they now face?
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Each Olympics event is an opportunity for the host country to showcase itself — its culture, its people, its food — to the world. In 2018, South Korea stood center stage as home to the PyeongChang Winter Games.
In the spirit of exploring opportunities in virtual reality (VR) storytelling for public diplomacy, JOVRNALISM partnered with the USC Center on Public Diplomacy to send an immersive storytelling team to South Korea during this unique time for the country’s world presence.
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A small JOVRNALISM team, in partnership with the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, traveled to South Korea during the Winter Games to produce immersive stories, here are some behind the scenes videos and photos.
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