Fader: An easy to use VR tool

Fader allows you to create VR stories easily and fast. All you have to do is upload your content, arrange your immersive 360 files into various scenes, click publish, and you are done.

Fader tutorial

Fader allows you to create and publish VR stories. Add multiple layers of information to your 360 spheres, design scenes and tell your story. Easy, fast and web-based!

Screenshot of the web editor

These are exciting times for us. We’ve been working on Fader for a few months now. So what do we aim for with Fader? Fader allows users with little or no VR journalism experience to create 360 experiences easily and fast.

Check out this 20 sec video of how easily you can add text to your VR story

With Fader, we want to specifically cater to tech-savvy users who can use their already existing content (anything from 360° videos/photos, but also text, audio, documents and content they find on social media) and arrange the content according to their needs, and then publish their VR story quickly.

This is how you create a VR story with Fader:

1. Go to fader.vragments.com and sign up/ sign in.
2. Open up a new VR story.
3. Add a title to your VR story (top left corner) and get started within your first scene.
4. On the left hand side, pick a media type you’d like to upload to your scene.
5. Open up a new scene.
6. Pick another media type you’d like to include into your new scene.
7. Repeat until you finish your VR story.
8. You can always preview your story by clicking the play button at the top. Use that preview URL on your mobile device as well. (Android only so far).
9. Publish your story and share with your friends.

With the help of the second round of funding from Google’s Digital News Initiative, we will extend Fader into a VR tool that can be used by journalists within their newsroom settings. We will be able to cater to different journalistic needs by working together with two organizations: Deutsche Welle and Euronews.

We are looking forward to kicking off this second part of our project. If you have any questions regarding the project or if you’d like to be part of this somehow, let us know.

About the author: Linda Rath-Wiggins, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of Vragments, a Berlin-based VR startup that creates VR experiences in collaboration with newsrooms (e.g. this German VR example with Deutschlandradio Kultur). Vragments is developing a VR tool called Fader which allows users to create and publish VR stories easily and fast. You can already sign up to try out the prototype. Vragments produced a first Fader use case in cooperation with the Center for Investigative Reporting.