NPR’s video team includes Bronson Arcuri, CJ Riculan, Maia Stern and Nick Michael, who worked on the Knight Foundation grant application.
A team at NPR is the winner of a grant to develop virtual-reality stories that will transport listeners to audio-rich soundscapes.
The NPR project is among 11 winners of the Journalism 360 Challenge awards announced Tuesday. Presented by the Knight Foundation, Google News Lab and the Online News Association, the grants of $15,000–$30,000 support the use of immersive storytelling in news.
Other winners include efforts to make immersive storytelling more accessible to community and ethnic media and to help journalists and others create location-based data visualizations in a virtual-reality format.
NPR’s team is receiving $15,000 to develop “best practices for immersive storytelling audio by producing two virtual reality stories with a particular focus on sound-rich scenes,” according to a statement from the grantors.
Place is important in 360-degree video, NPR Video Producer Nick Michael told Current. And audio is also crucial for understanding; spatial audio allows users to see and hear themselves in space. 360 experiences tend to focus on digital immersion, Michael said, but audio immersion has lagged behind. That gives NPR and the “world class audio experience in our building” an opportunity, Michael said.
NPR has already been dabbling in 360 experiments. Last year, NPR Music partnered with immersive media company RYOT to produce a 360-degree Tiny Desk concert featuring the band Wilco.
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Source: Current