Irfan Uraizee helped create a new platform for the news­ — through virtual reality.

“If you’re reading or watching a story it can become passive,” Uraizee, a senior broadcast and digital journalism major, said of the project. “People want to explore things for themselves.”

During the past summer, when he was an interactive applications intern for Gannett Digital, Uraizee helped create a virtual replication of a farm in southwest Iowa. It’s accessible using the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that uses 3-D imaging to recreate immersive scenes.

The virtual reality incorporates interactive video, text and graphics to help tell the farm’s story of how technology, climate and globalization have affected agriculture. The project can also be viewed on a computer.

Uraizee’s role in the project was to code many of the interactive elements that are present in the digital environment. Coding was a skill that Uraizee decided to teach himself during his sophomore year at Syracuse University. Throughout his internship, Uraizee said he had to learn new ways to code on the fly.

Uraizee believes that this type of interactive journalism has several advantages over more traditional formats. He said because a virtual reality is a complete story with so many aspects, it is less limited than written news stories or TV broadcasts.

He also believes that it offers a stronger connection to the content.

“You’re going to have more of an emotional connection if you’re going through it in this way,” Uraizee said.

Uraizee plans to create a similar virtual reality storytelling project at SU this spring with Dan Pacheco, the Peter A. Horvitz Endowed Chair in Journalism Innovation. Although he doesn’t know what the story will be yet, he hopes the project will be a collaboration between students from different schools across campus.

“I’m pretty excited to work on this new project. Everything feels pretty routine,” Uraizee said. “To be part of something on SU where I can breathe new life into journalism — that’s an incredible opportunity.”

Published on November 17, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Alex: aerdekia@syr.edu