Democratizing Immersive Creation Tools
Opening a Platform-locked VR tools landscape
In the past few years, many millions of people have been alerted to some of the nuanced digital battles of the internet age. Respectful discourse vs. trolls. Evidence-based reporting vs. misinformation and bots. Personal privacy vs. free, ad-driven business plans.
Many more users are hardly aware that an equally divisive battle has been raging regarding HOW users access the internet. An open-web, controlled by none, versus a coalition of closed platforms and apps that control (and often take some ownership of) what you publish through them.
And nowhere has this fight been more lopsided than in the emerging virtual reality industry. But with some new open and accessible tools, creators who want to control their VR, AR, and 360 products might have a fighting chance.
Right now, if you’re have a 360-video or a VR application, you need the aid of YouTube, Facebook, or a corporate/venture-capital backed platform at some stage of creation, hosting or distribution. And with each of these platforms, you are sacrificing some of the control — and potential ownership — of your content.
“Everything [VR] is sort of platform-locked. On a Gear 360 camera, the photos are in the gear platform or Oculus app, and videos need a video platform like Facebook or YouTube,” said Zach Wise, of Northwestern University’s Knight Lab… “I can’t just send you 360 or VR over text.”
VR has not been accessibly standardized for HTML.
There is no <VR src=”…”> to simply paste or publish a 360 or immersive experience into your web-presence.
So the current workaround for 360 users is to send viewers to the Camera platform, or through Facebook and YouTube, or to develop a complete mobile app that needs approval from the iOS or Android app stores. At each stage in the process, you control less of your content.
“You’re under their thumb,” said Wise. “ If Facebook changes its platform, or it’s algorithm, you have no more audience. You’re done.”
Losing control to locked platforms doesn’t just mean needing approval and risking takedowns. It means living at the mercy of feature-rollbacks and algorithm changes. It means trying to cobble-together insight from the limited data their platforms choose to give you. It means they control your community of followers, and they control how effectively you build a relationship with them. It means not controlling monetization, and it means not controlling your own progress.
But with the dominance of locked-platforms, open-source tools are springing up as a strings-free alternative. Thanks to the Mozilla Foundation’s WebGL, WebVR and new WebXR APIs have steadily produced open-standards for 3D web content. From those open yet complex APIs, communities of philanthropic developers are making tools to put the control of VR back in the hands of non-programmers.
The Knight Foundation’s 2017 Journalism 360 challenge awarded funding to multiple teams of innovators wanting to create open and accessible tools for journalists and storytellers who want to explore VR without writing code.
I talked with three of the Journalism 360 challenge winners about what they’re hoping to achieve with their tools.
Dataverses
Óscar Marín Miró is not a journalist; he spent his career communicating with visualization of massive datasets. When he first experienced VR in 2014, he says he “fell in love with the possibilities.”
“I try to imagine how would Data Visualization work in VR, and what would be the ‘Rules’ for that purpose in this new medium,” — Óscar Marín Miró
His project, Dataverses, is a VR data visualization tool with two priorities.
The first is compatibility with as many VR devices. Dataverses uses the previously mentioned WebVR open-standard developed by Mozilla. Marín Miró wants Dataverses experiences accessible from common web browsers.
The second is accessibility for users who don’t write code. Dataverses combines immersive media and data from a Google Spreadsheet.
“In this sense, you can configure experiences without writing code or tinkering with the software,” — Marín Miró.
Voxhop
Ainsley Sutherland has been leading development of a tool to collaboratively create an audio story about a location in VR.
“Journalists need to be able to edit. Voxhop is designed to make editing, giving and receiving feedback, and modifying a project all part of the production process.”— Ainsley Sutherland
Sutherland lauded existing audio XR tools, like MIT’s Roundware which uses GPS to send audio to you smart-device. She said Voxhop’s goal is to aid collaboration between reporter, editor and subject.
Cara Giaimo is a staff writer at Atlas Obscura. As a beta-tester, she is using Voxhop to capture into VR lasting moments and memories of the HOPE graffiti park in Austin, Texas, in the leadup to its disassembly.
“HOPE gallery is perpetually being recreated — people paint on top of each other’s stuff all the time. But this gallery is going to be demolished at the end of June,” said Giaimo.
“For these reasons, Voxhop seems like an ideal way to tell stories about it. This particular incarnation of the space will continue to ‘exist’ in VR, but it will be visually static — artists won’t be able to paint there anymore. However, because the platform allows for continuous editing by various users, more and more people will be able to add their memories and thoughts over time, restoring a different form of dynamism.”
Giaimo says there are plenty of storytelling tools that could have been used, but Voxhop enabled to her a type of storytelling she hadn’t done before, and proved “pretty intuitive to me as a journalist.”
SceneVR
If you Google ‘publish a 360-image’ in 2018, the resulting pages all suggest using Facebook or a closed-platform.
Zach Wise at Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, quoted in the earlier explanation of closed-platforms vs. open-tools, is trying to change that.
While Mozilla’s A-Frame and WebGL were the first open-frameworks for embedding 360-images and videos into a browser, SceneVR is focused on making browser-based 360 accessible.
The pre-alpha version of SceneVR, allowed entry-level users to copy assets and captions into a standardized Google Sheet template, similar to Dataverses, copy that spreadsheet link into SceneVR, then paste the resulting embed-code into your web page.
Riding shotgun on innovation
As the journalism industry shifts to compete with a whole internet of free content, innovation is necessary, but innovation doesn’t require capitulation to having tech company overlords.
“Innovation is coming out of big platform apps, that need to lock you in to get funding,” said Wise. “I still believe in the Utopian idea of the open web, where everyone is their own publisher. The dream is dying, but we’ll keep fighting until the light is gone.”
Wise, who previously created the innovative, open and accessible tools TimelineJS and StoryMapJS, said his mission is to “democratize VR and 360.”
“There are a lot of journalists who want to tell these stories, but with existing tools they can’t continue to own all of the rights to that story.” — Zach Wise
By using innovative, open and accessible tools to supplement your web presence, all creators, from big media companies to independent storytellers all have a better chance to compete.
- Users associate your products with innovation and creativity.
- Creators have greater capture and control of insightful and valuable audience data.
- Creators aren’t at the mercy of a platform in order to use innovations, giving them greater control of their monetization.
“We are so dependent on platforms as technology makers that they’re really driving the car right now. And if they veer off in a direction, we’re stuck going with them.” said Wise. “So [with open tools], we’re trying to be proactive instead of reactive. Let’s try to call shotgun and hold the map and advise [where tech companies lead us]… that would be nice.”
