New Cave Media is one of the 2017 winners of the Journalism 360 Challenge. See all the winners.
Project Description
We want to research the use of photogrammetry for journalistic storytelling and conduct a project that would use this method. In Aftermath VR, an app for Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream, we want to give our viewers a possibility to walk around the former sites of mass shootings and natural disasters and tell them what happened there through voice-over and archival footage.
We plan to start with a photogrammetry of a street in downtown Kyiv where snipers killed over 60 people on February 20, 2014, during the Euromaidan revolution. The viewer will be able to see and walk to the exact spots where every person was killed, and get to know more about them and what happened on that day.
Photogrammetry requires taking many pictures of locations or objects using digital cameras that many newsrooms and freelance journalists already have, and compiling them into a walkable 3D model. The result closely resembles reality that can be enriched with multiple narratives using additional media. The downside is that it is very labor-intensive, and one of the goals of our project is to find out the easiest and cheapest ways for newsrooms across the world to conduct such immersive projects in the future.
We would like to share every step of the production process on Medium, so our colleagues can apply some of our techniques and further develop them. We believe that photogrammetry can be a very strong tool in communicating presence, as it gives the viewer six degrees of freedom.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBJX1brG_Ak&w=882&h=496]