The inauguration of the 44th President of the United States Barack Obama was commemorated in many different ways. One new digital tool that captured the moment President Obama took the oath of office was Photosynth, a project from Microsoft that stitches together 2D photographs to form a navigable 3D space. This kind of technology is reliant on mass contributions--the more viewpoints the better the image. Photographers were told to "Take one photo of the moment when Obama takes the oath... take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom)" and email their photos to an address. Microsoft's software stitched these photos together and the resulting product, "The Moment," was displayed on CNN.com.
Can we apply this kind of user-contributed data to develop game spaces for news?
In some cases user-contributed data is meant to focus on the talent of the individual. In others, it is the wisdom of the crowd that is aggregated and synthesized. "The Moment" is an interesting example of both the talent of the individual and crowd working together--the individual photos need to be visually engaging on their own while serving the collage in full. The area closest to the President was the most heavily covered and thus makes for the most dynamic view of the oath. When moving through the photos, it is apparent there were certain professional photographers that did a lot of the work (a necessity of emerging technology that I'm willing to forgive). There are also currently some singular photographs standing as a kind of keyframe, awaiting new image submissions from inauguration attendees returning home, learning about the Photosynth collage, and uploading their images.
How does this fit into the Newsgames project, you might ask?
One area the project is interested in is citizen journalism, of which one definition reads: "The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others." [PBS MediaShift blog]
The contributers to "The Moment" certainly aren't making a game, but they are also not merely making a slideshow. Their input data is being used to construct something new--something that could not exist without them. We should embrace this mentality when considering the possibilities of citizen contributions to journalism and the game sphere. Instead of asking what our data are, we should ask what they could be. Can we use the work done by crowdsourcing of current events to create modeled spaces? What if the Photosynth software could also stitch together 3D models of a place that were created from 2D photographs? The resulting environment could then be explored using the kinds of interfaces we are accustom to in games and virtual worlds.
This is but an introductory example to user-contributed news and 3D spaces, but it serves as a mental exercise for the future applications of these kinds of technologies. Expect more on the possibilities of 3D spaces in my next entry.
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