I sat down at my computer Friday night watching tutorials about how to use Unity3D for beginners. I messed around with it a bit and thought, hey, this won’t be so bad. I sat down Saturday morning and began crafting my own world. The next time I looked at the clock it was 2 PM. I had to have found a worm hole. There in the corner of my bedroom, by my desk, was a time-sucking worm hole. However, to my dismay, it was just my complete lack of ability to operate this new program. Eventually, I got the hang of doing some of the simpler tasks. I had to restart so many times because I would get so far and then I’d come across some error that I could not resolve. My biggest tip for other beginners would be to check your console frequently for compiler errors, almost after each change or addition you make to your scene or project. This way if you come across something you can’t fix, you could just delete the element and try to find a different way to achieve what you were going for.
While I was working on my own world I thought of how useful this program could be for really fleshing out news stories. There have been many times where there are complex crime scenes that you can’t quite visualize or the story takes place in an unfamiliar place. Once I got a better grip on the controls of the program I was able to create my world pretty quickly, so I can’t imagine how much faster someone with more knowledge and experience could create something.
This experience brought me back to the digital divide, or the gap between people with the proper tools/access/knowledge of digital technology and those without. There are many factors to this idea, but it basically boils down to that. I thought this concept was relevant because I feel like it contributes to the changing news-consuming audience. Generally speaking the news is intended for everyone, but when journalists are thinking about how they can tell their long form stories to a generation of people that aren’t reading long form journalism, it felt like virtual reality could be a part of the solution.
The newer generations are more likely to be in the part of the digital divide that knows how to use the technology. They will have grown up on more and more technology. If there is speculation that attention spans have gotten shorter across much of our population, who is to say that won’t continue to get worse? I foresee a problem with written journalism being able to be sustained. I sense that since there is so much video being consumed, no matter how good a video is, it is still just a drop in the ocean. After using Unity3D I had the sense that immersive journalism could be one answer.
Check out my Unity3D World!
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