Hello! If you're reading this blog, you're probably either a member of the S.I. Newhouse School's VR Storytelling class; a member of the faculty, staff or alumni of the school; someone in the VR industry; or just someone who's interested in what we're doing in VR. No matter what brought you here, we want to welcome you!

This blog will be posted to (hopefully) regularly by myself, Dan Pacheco, or my partner in crime, Ken Harper. We're professors at the S.I. Newhouse School, and while we focus on different areas, we're both passionate about the potential of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other experiential media forms for putting people inside stories and everything that this means for journalism, storytelling, film, entertainment and really every communications field.

I'm starting this blog for several reasons. First, I want to spread the word about what we've been doing for the last few years that got us to this stage. While VR is currently all the rage, this wasn't always so. When I started with the help of some other pioneers like my good friend Nonny de la Peña -- who was working in this space several years before myself, despite numerous challenges -- I encountered a fair amount of healthy skepticism, including some of my own. But I stuck to my intuition, which was telling me that the VR approach introduced by the Oculus Rift was more than just an "add-on" to current media forms. It's an entirely new form of media in its own right with its own pluses and minuses.

Second, I want to start to systematically document what we're up to at Newhouse with our research into VR, AR and also gesture walls. What are gesture walls, you may ask? They're a third category of experiential media that few other places are taking seriously. However, with the help of Lorne Covington's NoirFlux we're learning has a lot of overlap with the VR and AR spaces.

And finally and perhaps most importantly, I want to put a spotlight on some of the amazing work that students at Newhouse are doing with CGI, 360 video and more. To that end, I also created this VRStorytelling site to publicly share tips and lesson plans so that other faculty in journalism and communications schools can learn along with us about how to teach these skills to students.

I'm kicking off the blog right before the 2016 Journalism Interactive conference in Gainsville, Florida, where I will be doing a 90-minute workshop for other journalism educators about how to teach VR, both in terms of 360 video production and computer-generated stories created in the Unity3D storytelling platform. But those are only two aspects of VR (and AR is around the corner), so I also want to extend my hand to other educators and suggest we find ways to collaborate and share our way to success.

To that end, all of the content on this site -- including tips posted by the students in our class at Newhouse -- are Creative Commons licensed. You're free to use anything with attribution back to VRStorytelling.org. I hope that other schools follow this same path. As we discover resources that supplement what we've started, we will happily link out to you and simply ask that you do the same if you use anything from here.

Thank you again for visiting our site. In the next few posts we will share some updates on the amazing content our students are producing in class.