By early 2018, New Cave Media, a Ukraine-based organization plans to launch an app called Aftermath VR, which uses photogrammetry–or the science of taking measurements from photos–to create 3D renderings of events like mass shootings or natural disasters with the sort of scope and scale that’s sometimes needed to make them comprehensible.

About the same time, Voxhop, a Cambridge, Massachusetts research group, will debut another reporting tool to share what happened a crime scene with immersive video that switches focus, allowing an event to be seen and narrated from multiple witness perspectives.

That’s because all three of those groups, and eight more, has received between $15,000 and $30,0000 of a $285,000 pot put up by the Knight Foundation, Google News Lab, and The Online News Association as part of the Journalism 360 Challenge, a competition that focused on answering one question:

How might we experiment with immersive storytelling to advance the field of journalism?”

The Journalism 360 Challenge generated 812 submissions within the U.S. and several other countries including Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Norway, Germany, and the UK since it was announced in March. The winning answers showcase the boldest tech-enabled plans to help newsmakers craft better narratives, ensure more ethical storytelling, and democratize production for underrepresented or underfunded groups within industry. Entrants ranged from classic print and broadcast groups, to universities, and digital startups.

Read the source article at fastcompany.com