360 degrees journalism

360-Degree Video and Journalism
From: Columbia University | By: John V. Pavlik

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION | Columbia journalism and new-media expert John V. Pavlik outlines the nature of 360-degree video and its implications for the transformation of the news. 360-degree cameraAlthough it is a technology more than two centuries in the making, 360-degree imaging has been slow to make its way into the storytelling of journalism. The reasons are many, including both the skeptical traditions of the newsroom toward anything "new" and the fact that 360-degree images shatter the long-held paradigm of photojournalism: framing an image is the best way to tell a story. But the problem with framing an image is that while it focuses attention, it also removes the object of attention from its surrounding context. 360-degree imaging allows both the continuation of framing and the inclusion of context.

We'll examine these historical origins in just a moment. The year 1996 saw the first commercial products in the omnidirectional market. Omniview introduced a product called PhotoBubbles, which were described as "spherical photographs." The company claimed that "PhotoBubbles capture the entire contents of any location in 180- or 360-degree immersive representations that can be reproduced for viewing on a computer or TV display." PhotoBubbles were used by a number of news organizations, including the New York Times on the Web and CNN interactive. A competing brand has described its product as "surround video."

In many ways, omnidirectional video represents a changing imaging paradigm, one fundamentally different from that of the Lumiere brothers a century before. PhotoBubbles are now called IPIX, and are now described as an "interactive photography technique that allows the user to be immersed inside a 360-degree digital image representing any environment that can be photographed. The user, via a mouse or keyboard input, is able to navigate in any desired direction in the interactive photograph, magnifying or exploring any part of the image."


To date, some of the problems leading to relatively limited use of omnidirectional imaging by news organizations have been the mandatory paradigmatic shift in news photography and videography; limitations in bandwidth, making pictures slow to download; and complications in installing the plug-ins that are used to view the pictures. In addition, the early products did not lend themselves to storytelling. Rather, the news organizations provided interesting 360-degree views of news events, frequently for features--but rarely did the images tell a story. Instead they were nice-to-look-at complements to an accompanying text report. Moreover, taking a good omnidirectional image is even more complex than taking a good still image, and a paradigm for omnidirectional storytelling is only beginning to emerge.

(an example can be found here or here)