Virtual Reality

The work we have done this week is mostly a reaction to the critique that we got during the mid crit-session. Some of the critique that we got was that we didn't bring anything new to the table since other news companies are now working on broadcasting news through virtual reality. So we needed to be more futuristic in a sense and do something in our own niche. Another question that occurred was if we saw ourselves as a company that both created news and distributed it or if we just distributed news that others been created.

We have been trying to answer those question. That has resulted in a, sort of, new concept, at least a new approach within our project. We want to present the news in a more interactive way compared with our previous way to distribute the news. Previously we were presenting the news in a 360 degree view, but now we will also include interaction. The user will be able to interact with people where the news are taking place. Other sort of interaction might as well be added during the process.

We have also decided to change the type of news we will distribute. Our idea now is a crowdsourcing news company. The idea is basically that people, all around the world, capture the news on their own and then sends the news to us and we distribute it through our "We Are News"-service. We are still presenting it in virtual reality which means that the crowd sourcing will be based on recording in 360 degrees. Today that would not be realistic since there is not that many people that own such equipment but we believe that in the future it will be more common, we believe that such availability of equipment will increase in the same speed as virtual reality. The news will be rated by the user in order to prioritize them and get rid of, in a sense, the bad news that will be sent to our service, since they will be unprioritized. The rating system will make it easier for everyone to keep track of what is popular at the time.

There are some problem we need to sort:

-One problem that has occurred to us is the validity of the news. Should we validate the news? or should we just distribute it?

-Who will do the “cutting” or process the news to make it interactable?

Next step is to try to answer those question and we want some feedback of our new approach, perhaps through a meeting with Malin or/and Daniel.

We got a mail from Anna Careborg about an opportunity to do a virtual reality reportage for SvD, we have been discussing that offer and considered how that might fit into our project and the possibilities to work on it. That part is still under discussion.