The article is something of a portal: Readers are transported inside real trains from cities all across the United States. They can see fully three-dimensional masked passengers scrolling through their phones or simply sitting idly, waiting for their stop. They can see every crevice of the cavernous vehicles dotted with empty seats. And it all can be experienced by simply visiting a webpage on Washingtonpost.com.
The article, which was published in the spring of 2021, examines how riding on public transportation had evolved one year after the emergence of covid-19. It does so with a constellation of storytelling tools. The piece blends narrative reporting, audio soundbites and, notably, a groundbreaking format known as spatial storytelling. A still nascent visual technology, spatial storytelling refers to the 3-D rendering of real objects and spaces, and its utility for media companies is profound. Using scanning technology on a mobile device, journalists can produce immersive portraits of the world around them, equipping audiences with unique visual insight to help them better understand key topics, trends or events. Like, say, the state of public transit. Nationwide, ridership on these systems dropped by roughly 80 percent during the pandemic. Journalists from The Washington Post created precise 3-D model replicas of vehicle interiors to lay bare the consequences of this dramatic shift in usage.
“If you’re not an essential worker or hadn’t had to use [public transit], the article helps you understand what it looked like and how it will continue to evolve,” said Elite Truong, director of strategic initiatives at The Post. “So, it’s not just capturing the object, it’s really taking you through a narrative with all of these visual aids and spatial cues.”
The technology used to create spatial storytelling isn’t altogether novel. What’s new is media outlets’ capacity to make the most of it. Scanning and rendering can be an onerous process, often too logistically burdensome for outlets that have to keep pace with a speedy news cycle. Yet thanks to the ongoing expansion of fast, reliable and secure 5G wireless, as well as increased accessibility of 3-D modeling tools, spatial storytelling will be more seamless to produce than ever before. “Spatial storytelling is an example of an exciting trend — a new wave of content creation through the smartphone,” noted William Stovall, vice president of mobility and IoT at AT&T Business. “5G will play a significant role in supporting spatial storytelling and other immersive formats going forward.”
The rise of spatial storytelling points to a budding reorientation in the visual language of American journalism. Today, it’s commonplace for media outlets to augment articles with high-def photos or documentary-style video; in the years to come, however, immersive 3-D renderings may become just as ubiquitous a narrative format.
For journalists, 5G is all about faster transfer of large data files. The increased bandwidth and speeds that come with 5G are evolving how content is being created and produced.
The making of 3-D models
The process for producing the public transit story began with a mobile phone. These days, many smart phones are equipped with a technology called lidar, one of a number of tools that can be used to produce spatial storytelling. Short for light detection and ranging, lidar works by using a laser to determine distance from an object. It’s not a single measurement, however. Lidar emits pulses of light in bunches, enabling it to recognize the most minute differences in an object’s orientation. Imagine you are inside a subway car. If you stand in the middle, some parts of the vehicle would be further away than others. By measuring the distance of every tiny bit of surface area, you can get a detailed sense of its shape. When using lidar, these readings are turned into what’s known as a point cloud; it’s the collection of often tens of thousands of individual range measurements that collectively can be used to reconstruct an object or space in the form of a 3-D model.
“This technology is a game changer in terms of being able to create 3-D models,” Truong said. “You literally just take the 5G-enabled smartphone and walk around an object to gather all the information you need.”
Of course, a massive amount of data is needed to execute visually immersive projects such as the transit story. In the past, this has been a hurdle to developing similarly ambitious experiences, as the files were often too large to share from the field. The process was slow, and there was no mechanism for editors and designers to communicate and collaborate with colleagues during the scanning process. Think, for instance, how challenging it would be for a film director who couldn’t view footage shot by a cinematographer in real-time and offer feedback, reshoots, a different angle.
“Before, you would have to go all the way back to the office to construct the model, and then possibly not have enough information and need to start over,” said Truong.
Yet the proliferation of next-generation network infrastructure has fundamentally changed the spatial storytelling production process for newsrooms. The wireless technology delivers the kind of robust data processing speeds and low latency required to share big data files efficiently. In developing the recent public transit story, for instance, The Post used AT&T connectivity to transmit scans from locations in different parts of the country. Truong and her team were able to review them almost immediately and offer actionable feedback as necessary.
“For journalists, 5G is all about faster transfer of large data files,” said Stovall. “The increased bandwidth and speeds that come with 5G are evolving how content is being created and produced.���
This technology is a game changer in terms of being able to create 3-D models,you literally just take the 5G-enabled smartphone and walk around an object to gather all the information you need.
The immersive future of journalism
The production process for the transit story offers a roadmap for how to integrate spatial storytelling into regular newsroom coverage, not only for The Post, but also for media companies across the country—with audiences set to benefit immensely. These experiences are both visually immersive and fundamentally explanatory, drawing news consumers in and helping them make sense of the world. Potential uses cases may include digitally reconstructing anything from a high-profile police raid to fashion shows in Milan.
“So much of spatial storytelling is about being able to place the reader in a situation so that they can experience it firsthand,” said Truong. “Sometimes a photograph just isn’t enough to help you understand the complexities of a story. You need to be able to see spatially how the area is laid out or think about how people moved around during an event, things like that.”
The immersive future of journalism
Spatial storytelling technology—with the support of advanced wireless infrastructure—is also laying the foundation for ever-more experimentation in journalistic formats, specifically virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). 3-D models provide the basis for both VR and AR experiences. With AR, these models are overlaid within the real world, allowing users to interact with the objects via a smartphone, tablet or connected glasses. VR, meanwhile, places users inside a fully immersive 3-D environment; while some VR environments are created using film footage or animation, others may be constructed through a scanning and rendering process. In the future, these formats—and thus the spatial storytelling techniques often used to create them—are expected to gain popularity. According to recent research, the mobile AR market is projected to grow to $29.5 billion by 2025, up from $7.6 billion in 2020.
For The Post, that means the recent transit release is only the beginning of its experimentation with the type of spatial storytelling that’s supported by next-generation wireless technology.
“Five years from now, this is going to be something people are using constantly,” Truong said. “Being able to create 3-D models of events and being able to [help readers] understand things even more deeply is really the point.”
This Creative Group release documents the production of a recent newsroom article on the impact of the pandemic on public transit. While reporting that story across different locations, Washington Post journalists used the AT&T network and 5G-enabled devices to create and share Lidar-scanned 3-D models and upload data-heavy 3-D scans.