Guardian Australia’s data and interactive editor, Nick Evershed, said there was a long way to go to bridge the gap between what people thought virtual reality could do and where the technology was at.
“The interest is around the ability to actually put yourself in an interactive, fully immersive 3D environment, and I don’t think the potential has been overstated,” he said. “But it’s going to take a shitload of resources.”
Evershed said that virtual reality, or “VR”, would be best-suited for bigger news projects such as longform documentaries.
“The audience is already there for the big social media platforms but it’s not there for VR because people don’t have the headsets yet,” Evershed said. “There’s a very, very small audience.”
Evershed, who was recently awarded a grant from the Walkley Foundation to develop robots that will “generate news stories automatically and programmatically,” was speaking during a session on story-telling techniques at the New News Conference at the Wheeler Centre, in Melbourne.
He hopes that robots, ultimately, could help reduce the workload of journalists, giving them more time to focus on in-depth investigations.
Buzzfeed Australia editor Simon Crerar said the company had been experimenting with augmented reality in their video series Tasty. He said it presented a “bird’s eye view” of preparing and cooking food, which meant your head was positioned where the camera was.
“You can sort of project yourself into [it] . . . almost as if you’re in there,” Crerar said. The videos, he added, were cheap to make.
“We make lots of them to figure out the kind of things people are likely to share,” Crerar told ther audience, made up mostly of media professionals and journalism students. “It’s teaching us a lot about what audiences are interested in and how far they’re prepared to go.”
“The interest is around the ability to actually put yourself in an interactive, fully immersive 3D environment, and I don’t think the potential has been overstated,” he said. “But it’s going to take a shitload of resources.” — Nick Evershed, Guardian Australia
Fellow panelist Sophie Black, The Wheeler Centre’s head of programming, said that in the meantime journalists would continue to use whatever technology they could to tell stories – with varying degrees of success.
She said that Vine’sdiscontinuation of its mobile app, due to a drop in stock prices and users, was just “the latest in a series of deaths”, and that Twitter was also “on the wane”.
But Black said podcasting “was having a moment” and had also seen a big rise in audience interest in recent years.
Crerar agreed, adding that the investigative podcast Serial was a good example.
Fellow panelist Alicia Sometimes, who is part of The Outer Sanctum Podcast, which began as a group of friends talking about football to become consumer favourite, was passionate about the medium.
“It’s such an intimate art form, isn’t it? You feel like you know the person really well . . . You get to know their sense of humour,” she said.
Sometimes said another advantage of podcasting was that listeners could choose what, when and how to listen.
SBS News and Current Affairs reporter Stefan Armbruster cautioned that it was journalists that used the technology, and not the other way around.
He said he was worried about recent discussions he’d had with some university advisory boards that were considering “rebranding” journalism courses as “content maker courses”.
“Journalism is a particular skill. It’s a critical skill,” he said. “Content production is a different craft and does not necessarily involve journalism, whereas journalism always involves content production.
“At the end of the day, people still want a good story.”