Lesson 05: Distributing and Sharing Your Immersive Work Online

A key part of working with emerging media storytelling is understanding how to bring it to your audiences. By their nature emerging mediums are not widely adopted by the general public and viewing habits are not established. That means that immersive journalists need to think through both how they intend to get their stories to their planned audience and how to walk the audience through experiencing a piece in a new medium. Immersive stories present a few unique questions: Do you go for a wider audience by choosing a more accessible technology OR do you want to push the technology forward with tools that present new capabilities but aren’t as easy for an audience to use? Do you set up your story for online distribution AND/OR do you want to connect and share with people in person so that you walk them through how to interact with the piece and learn from how the audience responds?

Learning Outcomes
    • Assess audience experience in trying a new medium

    • Formulate a process for successfully onboarding viewers 

    • Describe variety of viewing devices and platforms

Lesson Outline

Onboarding and bringing people into a new medium

Desktop, smartphone and headset distribution

Social platforms – YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook

Smartphone – apps

Web Browser – Web XR, A Frame

Headsets – Oculus TV,  Steam

In-person

Here’s a Medium post that collects a lot of VR film festivals: https://vrfilmreview.ru/vr-film-festivals-2020-e809a6a3d633

Discussion Topics

What are some of the ways you can deliver an immersive story?

What are the benefits of each mode of delivery?

Which stories work best with some of the modes of delivery

Discuss the benefits and shortcomings of delivering an immersive story on your phone, desktop or headset

End of lesson feedback

3-2-1 (3 takeaways, 2 questions, 1 thing they enjoyed)