Posts

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  Ideas | Nov 9, 2020

  The Rise of Product Thinking in Media: A Series

  As media and news organizations try to build successful digital products, they are learning that “product thinking” is a key to success. This series of articles explores product thinking as an emerging discipline, shows how it has worked in practice, and provides advice for people considering career opportunities in product work. 1: Journalism Has Been Disrupted.  Can Product Thinking Save It? In the last 25 years, media organizations have had to evolve from one-product businesses...

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  Lab , projects | Sep 16, 2020

  Another Big TimelineJS Update That You Shouldn’t Even NoticeBut we wanted to warn you ahead of time

  by Joe Germuska

  There’s another big but invisible change coming to TimelineJS. In July, we announced a big update to TimelineJS on the day of the release. With some minor exceptions, we were right that most people didn’t notice. Next week, we’ll be making another big update, which, again, we hope you won’t notice. This time, we thought we should announce it ahead of time, because timelines created before January, 2015 will probably stop working unless steps are taken. Timelines...

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  Ideas | Aug 28, 2020

  Evaluating VR and AR Tools for the ClassroomHow we choose tools for Knight Lab Studio

  by Rebecca Poulson | RebeccaPoulson

  In the Knight Lab: Studio class, every Virtual and Augmented Reality project is a blank slate. All of our developers are learning how to make VR and AR for the first time; many of them don’t even consider themselves developers yet. With the exception of a few projects which have run in successive quarters, we’re never building on something that already exists. We go from “New Project” to our final destination in ten weeks. The fact that...

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  Lab , projects | Jul 9, 2020

  A Big TimelineJS Update That You Shouldn’t Even Notice

  by Joe Germuska

  Today we’re releasing a new version of TimelineJS, but most of you shouldn’t even notice a difference. We make updates to TimelineJS periodically, and we usually don’t say much about it, partly because people who publish timelines using our embed tool are automatically updated to the new version—there’s nothing they need to change. That includes this new release. However, in this case, we thought it was worthwhile posting for two related reasons. First, this release...

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  Studio | Augmented Reality Features with 3D Food Photography

  Building AR Journalism Experiences to Educate and Inform

  by Agnes Lee , Rui Xin Oh , Harrison Pearl , Carlyn Savino , Brian Sui

  In Spring of 2020, one of the Knight Lab Studio teams focused on exploring how Augmented Reality can be used to create experiences and tools within journalism and food media. They identified three major categories of experiences. Later this summer, we’ll be sharing their work on experiences focused on entertaining and connecting audiences. This week we’re sharing what they learned while building experiences intended to educate and inform. Making Information Available in the Right Place......

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  Ideas | May 18, 2020

  AR Face Filters: How Do They Work and How Are They Changing Us?

  by Mary Truong

  This video explains the mechanisms behind how selfie filters change our digital images and then how this might psychologically affect us. To make this video, I researched “Snapchat Dysmorphia” and also looked for the technical understanding of selfie filters. Before creating this video, I made a selfie filter for the Knight Lab using Spark AR to get a sense of how face deformation would work in Instagram selfie filters. The animation workflow for me looked...

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  Ideas | May 11, 2020

  9 Important VR Experiences for Journalists to See

  by Zaria Howell

  In an era where social media outpaces print newspapers in the U.S. by a whopping 4% (Pew Research Center, 2018), there is much to be said about the role of interactive media technology in minimizing this gap between technology and storytelling. How can publications, and the journalists within them, use interactive media technology to re-engage with this lost audience? And why might this shift towards digital storytelling, such as VR, be more valuable for journalism than...

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  Events | Feb 18, 2020

  7 Reflections on SRCCON:Productthe first conference for “product thinkers” in media

  by Rich Gordon

  Marco Túlio Pires On Feb. 8 in Philadelphia, I was lucky to be one of about 150 participants at SRCCON:Product, the first conference for “product thinkers” in media. A few reflections on what I saw and learned: 1. A quarter of a century into the digital age, we are finally figuring out how to build media products In 1995, I was named the first online director for The Miami Herald, with responsibility for launching the...

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  Studio | Storytelling with GIFs

  Exploring and Understanding the Storytelling Potential of GIFsHow GIFs are used across different platforms

  by Justine Banbury , Emily Chaiet , Naeem Patel , Idrees Kamal

  From memes to animated data visualizations, GIFs have become a staple in the way we communicate digitally to express ideas, feelings, and concepts. GIFs are a self-contained media format consisting of several single-frame images; it’s a format that is more compact and shareable than video. Additionally, GIFs are platform-agnostic; this means that they are not locked into any one platform’s ecosystem – like Instagram or Snapchat stories – to dictate how they are shared. This studio......

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  Lab projects | Jun 28, 2019

  Building a Community for VR and AR Storytelling

  by Rebecca Poulson | RebeccaPoulson

  In 2016 we founded the Device Lab to provide a hub for the exploration of AR/VR storytelling on campus. In addition to providing access to these technologies for Medill and the wider Northwestern community, we’ve also pursued a wide variety of research and experimental content development projects. We’ve built WebVR timelines of feminist history and looked into the inner workings of ambisonic audio. We’ve built virtual coral reefs and prototyped an AR experience setting interviews...

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  Ideas | Jun 10, 2019

  A Brief Introduction to NewsgamesCan video games be used to tell the news?

  by Victoria Cabales

  When the Financial Times released The Uber Game in 2017, the game immediately gained widespread popularity with more than 360,000 visits, rising up the ranks as the paper’s most popular interactive piece of the year. David Blood, the game’s lead developer, said that the average time spent on the page was about 20 minutes, which was substantially longer than what most Financial Times interactives tend to receive, according to Blood. The Uber Game was so successful that the Financial...

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  Studio | Information Spaces in AR/VR

  Designing Information Spaces for Augmented Reality

  by Ashcon Abae | , Nia Adurogbola | nia_unofficial , Michela Ferrari | , Akhil Kambhammettu | akambham , Paige Shin

  In the winter quarter of 2019, our team explored how Augmented Reality can benefit different types of journalism. Over the course of the class, we built four unique projects that ranged from translating a sports broadcast into mobile AR to building visual experiences for podcast listeners Translating Timelines into Augmented Reality We began by breaking down how timelines function and what their capabilities were, and we settled on a problem statement: “How might we represent thematically......

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  Events | Mar 6, 2019

  With the 25th CAR Conference upon us, let’s recall the first oneWhen the Web was young, data journalism pioneers gathered in Raleigh

  by Rich Gordon

  For a few days in October 1993, if you were interested in journalism and technology, Raleigh, North Carolina was the place you had to be. The first Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference offered by Investigative Reporters & Editors brought more than 400 journalists to Raleigh for 3½ days of panels, demos and hands-on lessons in how to use computers to find stories in data. The cover of the Raleigh conference program. Nerds like us couldn't resist bad...

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  Studio | Resurrecting History for VR

  Transforming Stereographs into Point Clouds

  by Avriana Allen | https://twitter.com/avriana_a

  Virtual and augmented reality, though often used for gaming purposes, may be turned to a more academic or journalistic purpose. Throughout the fall, we explored ways to make historical footage, such as videos and pictures, available in a more interactive space. One method we developed allowed us to create 3D point clouds from stereographs, (two photos taken an ocular distance apart which, when viewed through a stereoscope, appeared 3D). In the simplest of terms, we......

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  Studio | Oscillations

  The Hammer Without A NailOscillations is a New Art Form Making Meaningful Impact

  by Nicole Fallert , Janet Lee

  Imagine a classroom of elementary-aged students. They appear to be sitting cross-legged on the floor or walking around the room, but in reality, they’re dancing. Dancers flash across the screens of the virtual reality headsets the students wear. The performers jump and turn just inches from the young audience members’ eyes. The children can see the subtle flexibility of the dancers, connecting the shifts of movement to the music’s tempo. Looking up, down and side......

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