The Wall
Storytelling innovation from the USA TODAY Network.
I designed the VR experience within a larger multimedia reporting project called The Wall, a project that ultimately won a Pulitzer Prize. This was a smaller project for me that presented a fascinating new challenge and I was thrilled to take it on.
First and foremost in the process, I needed to define what we could actually build in the time allotted with the resources available.
Making it virtually real.
When I joined The Wall project I quickly realized that the hoped for VR experience would not be possible with the data and reporting that would be available The LIDAR data we'd gathered wouldn't work as-is for an immersive on-the-ground experience, and our human reporting often didn't match up to the locations we'd mapped.
I worked with our partners in the newsroom to figure out a storytelling framework that we could build in a short time frame with limited engineering resources. A solution we could ship on time.
Documentation of the menu interface's three-dimensional depth.
A Pulitzer prize winner.
The solution was elegant: we placed storytelling moments along the border, viewed from a satellite-level, and distributed those moments into chapters. Some pieces of reporting were traditional video vignettes, others were audio recordings. The 3D environments we built could live alongside more traditional storytelling while keeping everything in a proper geographic and narrative context.
It was a gratifying challenge to put everything together, and I'm proud to have contributed to a reporting project that won USA TODAY's first Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.
