How Do WVU Students Live?
Welcome to Where WVU Lives, a project that creates a 3D time capsule documenting how West Virginia University students lived in 2016. As you virtually roam through a student’s house, apartment or dorm room you’ll see nearly everyone is on their phone or computer. Decorations vary, but many have tapestries, others have beer trees or muskets. Some spaces spaces are luxurious while others are organized chaos. It’s a modern portrait of student life.
The project began in the spring of this year as students in the WVU’s Experimental Storytelling class were given the question: how can we use the capabilities of 3D virtual reality modeling and translate it to modern journalism? Our tool was and continues to be the Matterport camera system, which was originally designed for real estate.
We faced challenges when creating 3D models. How do we go beyond sharing a physical space and representing the subject that lives in it? With the complexity of 3D model, the user is allowed to roam the space at their own free will — we as authors are no longer completely in control of what the user sees. Another challenge: How do we accurately represent people in a 3D space? Ultimately we chose to show the subject interacting with their space in a sequence of shots that the user can observe.
In our search we’ve attempted to go beyond the typical population of WVU by seeking a variety of students. We welcome to suggestions or new people who have an interesting story about their space or have an interesting story of their lives.
— Natalie Lorenze, senior & editor Where WVU Lives
West Virginia University
November, 2016
Contact: Natalie Lorenze on Medium or @NatalieLorenze on Twitter
Editor’s Note: Some profiles in this project were originally published on WhereWVULives.com in the spring of 2016 as part of WVU’s JRL 493 Experimental Storytelling. That project was led by student editor Justin Hayhurst and along with Matterport editor Natalie Lorenze and other participating students. We migrated the project to Medium in November, 2016.
