Announcing the Jump Camera Program at the RNC and DNC

Great journalism is immersive, making issues more resonant and accessible by bringing audiences to the center of the action. At the Google News Lab, we’re always looking for new technologies that can help journalists tell those types of stories — particularly around important news moments.

Which is why we couldn’t be more excited to announce the Jump camera loaner program at the Republican and Democratic national conventions. Over the course of both conventions, we’ll be working with YouTube to loan Odyssey Jump Cameras, from GoPro and Google to a number of media organizations and provide stitching and assembling services to help bring their VR stories to life.

Jump cameras are cutting edge tools for VR storytelling. The camera consists of 16 camera modules in a circular array, optimized to work with the Jump assembler. The assembler helps transform the 16 pieces of video into stereoscopic VR video, adding additional depth to the visual.

CNN’s Craig Waxman walks onto the RNC convention floor to gather b-roll of the proceedings.

What does that mean for viewers?

The jump camera captures stereo VR videos, helping storytellers create perfect 360 degree videos that give viewers the ability to experience a scene from every direction — and feel like they are there. Jump consists of three parts: a camera rig with specialized geometry (GoPro, Yi Technologies and IMAX), an assembler (using Google’s cloud), and a player (YouTube). The videos are super high resolution — the equivalent of five 4k TVs playing at once. The 3D alignment approach creates a beautiful seamless panorama, so you won’t see borders where cameras are spliced together (as is often the case with VR stories).

Jeremy Gilbert and Phoebe Connelly of the Washington Post insert memory cards into the 16 cameras.

Conventions have long been critical to the pageantry and prose of American Presidential politics. We’re excited to see the great stories our partner media organizations produce in the upcoming weeks using this promising new storytelling tool.

Along the way, we’ll be sure to share some case studies and lessons learned from the organizations themselves, as they look to bring audiences closer to the action than ever before.

A big thanks to the following media organizations for participating in our inaugural Jump camera loaner program:

The Atlantic

Bloomberg

AP

CNN

The Washington Post

Time