Look Ahead: Out of This World

A screenshot of the “Discovering Gale Crater” VR tour

The Los Angeles Times is setting its sights on the stars, or more accurately, on Mars. Utilizing virtual reality and coding technology, the newspaper built its first ever VR story, “Discovering Gale Crater,” an immersive look at the Mars Gale crater.

Armand Emamdjomeh, Los Angeles Times Web developer and visual journalist

While there’s been a lot of discussion about VR as an empathy machine, Len DeGroot, director of data visualization, and Armand Emamdjomeh, Web developer and visual journalist, wanted to explore other human emotions through virtual reality: wonder, adventure and curiosity.

In a two minute tour, the Times project takes audiences through the surface of the crater using NASA photographs. They can first go through the guided tour, narrated by NASA’s Fred Calef, who works at the Mars Science Laboratory, and then explore the virtual crater on their own.

The unpredictability factor in creating a self-exploration option was the greatest challenge in building the project, said Emamdjomeh.

“We had to account for people doing things you wouldn’t expect,” he said.

Many other VR pieces are app based, but the Times took a different direction, foregoing the app and focusing on a browser-based experience. This cut out some potentially limiting barriers for readers who didn’t want to download the app.

However, it also created some difficulty for Emamdjomeh and DeGroot, who had to render compatible browser capabilities on iOS, Windows, Android and other software platforms.

Still, the project was a success. At the time E&P spoke with DeGroot and Emamdjomeh “Discovering Gale Crater” had garnered 32,000 page views with an average of eight minutes spent on the page.

Emamdjomeh and DeGroot also published a guide describing how they created the two-month long project. They hope to make it into an open source template.

“We think this is a potentially important medium and we wanted to be at the forefront of the technology,” DeGroot said.

Len DeGroot, Los Angeles Times director of data visualization

Emamdjomeh and DeGroot both shared their excitement for the project and the future of immersive journalism, and they both believe VR is going to be another storytelling tool in the newsroom’s tool belt.

“(VR) is going to change journalism as much as TV changed journalism. It changed it, but nothing was left behind,” DeGroot said.

Mitra Kalita, managing editor for editorial strategy, said the Times is currently brainstorming and working on future VR pieces as well as focusing on finding inventive ways to tell visual stories in the future.

To immerse yourself in the Gale crater, visit graphics.latimes.com/mars-gale-crater-vr or visit graphics.latimes.com/mars-gale-crater-how-we-did-it for more information.