Dan Archer of Aptos, California, explored transmedia storytelling (publishing different parts of news stories across multiple digital platforms) through the creation of a visual news consultancy, Empathetic Media, that will provide production services to newsrooms without the in-house expertise or budget to do so for themselves. Platforms included the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and Unity game engine (for VR and web apps), as well as interactive webdocs, multimedia graphic journalism pieces and data visualizations produced in HTML5.

During his fellowship, Archer created a virtual, interactive re-creation of the scene where Michael Brown was fatally shot in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. The piece, which is hosted on Fusion’s website, is made up of a series of web comics and 3-D simulations.