Nonny de la Peña
Los Angeles, California 
Homepage: http://www.nonnydlp.com/
Nonny de la Peña is a Senior Research Fellow in Immersive Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. A graduate of Harvard University, she is an award-winning documentary filmmaker with twenty years of journalism experience including as a correspondent for Newsweek Magazine and has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Premiere Magazine, and others. Her films have screened on national television and at theatres in more than fifty cities around the globe with praise from critics like A.O. Scott who called her work “a brave and necessary act of truth-telling.” Using knowledge from her Annenberg master’s degree in online communities and her lengthy career as a news reporter, de la Peña co-founded Stroome to provide a collaborative visual journalism site for the web. While at USC, she continues to push technological boundaries for journalistic endeavors, including the exploration of 3D environments for news, non-fiction and documentary.
Contact:
These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.
May 28, 2010
Ernest Wilson, the dean of the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, put it like this: What if, after receiving the home and garden section in the morning, the reader could walk right
into the section and visit a garden? This bucolic vision reflects one potential scenario for what we are calling at Annenberg “immersive journalism,” a new genre that utilizes gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. As a senior research fellow, I am prototyping immersive journalism stories, hoping to discover and create best practices for a burgeoning filed that can capture audiences increasingly accustomed to experiencing digital worlds.
The fundamental idea of immersive journalism is to allow the audience to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story. The pieces can be built in online virtual worlds, such as Second Life, or produced using a head-tracked head-mounted display system, or HMD. An HMD is a lightweight helmet that has screens covering the eyes and tracks head movement so ensure digital imagery on the screens stays in perspective to create a sensation of having a virtual body in a virtual location. Immersive journalism can also be constructed in a Cave, which uses full body-tracking technologies in a small room so that individuals can move their bodies around the space.
Visual and audio primary source material from the physical world reinforce the concept that participants are experiencing a nonfiction story, with the video, sounds or photographs acting on the narrative. For example, video triggers at key points in the virtual landscape to remind a participant that the computer generated environment is grounded in the physical world. Scripted events that create a first person interaction with the reportage can also help create a feeling of “being there.” Also, participants can query or interact with the elements around them to learn more about the details or context of the news story. More...
No comments | 
Archive Link
May 18, 2010
[Editor's note: For the latest on this week's KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp, visit knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog.]Cartography is undergoing a renaissance that is opening new opportunities for journalists. For example, the Los Angeles Times' successfully updates and moves the police blotter onto the Web by using Google maps to pinpoint homicides. However, mapping technologies offer even more robust data mining possibilities.
Hypercities, a mapping project out of UCLA, connects time and geographical spaces. The site allows users to put historical layers on to maps, such as overlaying John Snow's nineteenth century work tracing the cholera epidemic on to a map of present-day London. A much more impressive undertaking on Hypercities was created by Xarene Eskandar, a graduate student at UCLA. She consolidated content on the Iranian election to create a geo-located reportage of more than 800 YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, Flickr photographs, and other forms of documentation. Hypercities says that, "The result is the largest, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, and sometimes even minute-by-minute web documentation of the election protests in Iran." More...
No comments | Archive Link
RSS Feed
