• February 24rd:  We are proud to be part of the frank conference that is taking place in Gainesville, Florida: a conference dedicated to social impact, storytelling and public interest communications.
• February 25th/26th: As part of his trip down south, Dan will also be demoing Empathetic’s VR and AR at Changeville and Journalism Interactive, which will also be held in Florida. Busy week in the swamp!
• Investors Wanted: We are now actively looking for investors in order to grow Empathetic Media.Contact us if you are interested or know someone who is and we’ll do lunch. Well, skype.
• Awarded: We’re pleased to announce that our VR piece on the Colombian conflict (that’s it in the screenshot above) was awarded a grant by the Images and Voices of Hope foundation. IVOH focuses on restorative narratives, providing a redemptive, positive perspective on journalistic storytelling. Here’s a sample screencast of an early proof of concept from one of the scenes in the project.
• Homepage remodelled: We’ve overhauled our online home! Click here and let us know what you think!

We’re constantly looking for new ways to tell stories: 3D scanning, photogrammetry, drones, game engines, animation After Effects, good ol’ pen and paper, you name it. But one medium of late has been getting a lot of attention: virtual reality. So how do you tell your google cardboard from your Gear VR (modelled above by our founder Dan in various emotional states at the Kaleidoscope VR film festival) from your Oculus? Well, you can start here with a little intro piece on the technology that goes into our VR experiences. For a glimpse at the future of the medium, it’s also well worth listening to the recent Unity conference keynote. Plus the prolific Prof Robert Hernandez does a great job of laying bare his VR syllabus at USC so you can dig a little deeper. Check out his tumblr here.

Have a story in mind, but not sure how to tell it? Part of our mission is to partner with organizations who don’t have the in-house capacity to build or experiment with these new forms of storytelling. We’ve worked with large newsroom teams to much smaller NGOs on a wide range of projects and would be glad to help you realize your vision across a range of media. A VR experience can be a whole street, like Ferguson Firsthand or a single room – and it doesn’t take a Hollywood budget either. Get in touch and let’s talk!

Empathetic Media Reading List

Empathetic Media is also keen on starting a discussion of the emerging future of storytelling media (above is a sketch of one such discussion from the Walkley Foundation’s Storyology conference in Australia last year)  here are some links that you might find interesting, feel free to retweet them (with a shout out to @empatheticmedia of course) or send us your feedback.