Welcome to the 17th issue of Nuanced Narratives.
Next Thursday January 4th at 10AM CET I'll be hosting a live case study with the Kontinentalist team, we’ll be looking into the making of their visual essay on traditional architecture in Asia.
If you’d like to join the session you can reply to this email requesting an invitation, or sign up for the free membership tier on Patreon.
Moving forward all talks and case studies will be recorded and published on the magazine for everyone to access, but only members will be able to join the talks to ask questions.
Inspiration
This month's award goes to Giorgia Lupi and the teams at Pentagram and Decimal for their outstanding work visualizing life with long covid. I’ll try to reach out to ask about recording a case study! :)
The special mention goes to Voices from the Frontlines, a gigantic endeavour by CLEVER*FRANK for the Africa Climate Mobility Initiative. The project combines custom mapping, beautiful design and tons of data visualisation.
Insights
Earlier this month I hosted a talk with Tim Clark about XR journalism, discussing his R&D work for the New York Times. You can watch the full talk or read the summary here.
Here are a couple key takeaways in XR storytelling, production, and scalability.
XR Story Development
Currently XR development is challenging, primarily using Unity and Unreal Engine but the field is expected to become more designer-friendly over the next few years.
Voiceover v Text
XR may bring a shift from text-heavy to voice-based storytelling as viewers cannot focus on both text and environments / subjects simultaneously, but voiceover is slow and lengthens the duration of stories.
Templatization
It'll be important for newsrooms to build scalable systems standardizing story adaptation across platforms, for example:
- Use a volume template in XR to create spatially aware narratives.
- Make stories contextually available based on the user's location, triggering notifications on devices to open immersive geo-located experiences.
- Create companion experiences for mobile XR or headsets, triggered by scanning QR codes on articles.
Obsessions
Latest curations from my internet garden.
- ArcGIS announced a Maps SDK for Unreal Engine
- Steven Bernard’s favourite maps of the year
- Yizhe’s experimentation with photorealistic 3D scenes using Gaussian Splatting
- Open News has started a peer data review program
- Nadieh Brehmer’s interactive Christmas Card
- This new year’s cartoon by Ben Jennings
Thanks for reading. See you next year!
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