philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

See the full story here: http://www.storybench.org/new-york-times-graham-roberts-augmented-reality-suited-hard-news/

On April 7, 2018, a chemical bomb was dropped onto the rooftop of a residential building in the Syrian city of Douma, near Damascus, killing dozens of people, many of them children. While the Syrian regime flatly denied that it had launched the attack, the United States and its allies claimed that a chlorine bomb had been dropped by the Syrian government.

In an attempt to get to the truth of the attack, The New York Times last month published an interactive investigative story that reconstructs the virtual scenes of the chemical attack and walks the readers through the key pieces of evidence – all in augmented reality.

Storybench spoke with Graham Roberts, the director of immersive platforms storytelling at The New York Times, to understand how new technologies like AR can be used for powerful news stories.

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We had taken a look at the video they were working on and it dawned on us that this is a spatial three-dimensional story. I mean, all the evidence that we’re looking at here is based on where things were arranged and found in a particular state. In this case, it was the balcony where the [chemical] weapon was found. It was just one of those things where we thought, wow, this would just be perfect to explore using augmented reality or virtual reality or whatever you may like to call it.

... spatial computing is this idea that, well, now this technology kind of exists to put this information directly into the world in front of us. We don’t have the form factors yet, the hardware is definitely not there yet, so what we are doing on the phone is now leaning into that future to understand, what if we wouldn’t have to interact on this square little screen and there’s a different kind of way that digital information can be understood? My optimistic side is this will [help us] have a more human kind of interaction with the information we consume.

Are we creating something or are we capturing  something? So those are two very important distinctions.