This week we have been tasked to pick a news story that could utilize Virtual Reality and 3D Web technology. The story I would like to tell using these innovations would be about the solar eclipse. Not only has this been a prevalent story everywhere you turn, but I think it could have great applications as far as this technology goes. Using these methods would also set you apart from the standard articles giving path estimations and explaining how to view the eclipse without burning your retinas.
I think that the virtual reality portion of this story comes after the eclipse has occurred. I have seen that organizations like NASA are gearing up for this event and plan on live streaming it. There will be plenty of images that could be used to recreate this event. What I think would be really cool, is to pick one location that is going to experience the full eclipse and have the place recreated at the peak eclipse time. This way people that either missed it or were not in a location that was in the path of the full eclipse, could still experience what it would be like to walk around outside. Could 360 video lend itself to this story? Sure, but I thought I saw somewhere that not all cameras are suitable for capturing this solar event and that equipment’s light sensors could be affected from repeated exposure. I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my gear. Instead, I could use the footage from the NASA live streams, people who are more equipped to record such an event, to recreate one of the locations in VR where all of the equipment is definitely safe from damage. I believe I saw that they would have locations across the country set up and that they would be following its path across the country. This would also give us options as far as which location we wanted to recreate. I am not sure how this part would work, but maybe the eclipse in the VR is safer to view? Since it is artificial the bright light ring around the moon could be dimmed for safety or since it is not actual rays the intensity/brightness could still be accurate but safe to view in VR? Again, these would be logistics I am unsure of. I’d need to research or contact someone much smarter than myself to get the answers to because I would want it to be as accurate as possible but obviously safe to view.
The 3D web portion of this story I think is a little easier to apply and would replace all the infographics we have seen about the path of the eclipse. With inspiration from The WebGL Globe from the Chrome Experiments, I thought it would have been a much more visually appealing and stimulating way to explore the path of the eclipse. There could be a color gradient associated with view percentages and the path could have been drawn with the respective colors. This would have allowed viewers to search their location and see where they were in relation to the path right on the globe. Such a representation would also allow for people to move the Earth and follow the entire path of the solar eclipse.
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