Rather than just hearing case studies about what newsrooms are doing with immersive technologies, University of Missouri students will interact with professionals in these fields in the classroom during an upcoming event.

“It’s one thing to look at a car online,” says Jim Flink, assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and event leader. “It’s a whole other thing to go test drive a car or talk to a person on a car lot and say, show me that car, and that’s what we’re hoping to do.”

“RJI Innovation Series” on Sept. 17 and 18 is an offshoot of Flink’s annual journalism symposiums hosted at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute that brings in professionals and dozens of speakers each year to focus on topics such as mobile journalism, revenue models, and collaboration. Flink decided to move the event, which is only open to faculty and students this year, to the classrooms to make it easier for them to attend. 

The 2018 speakers are Sarah Hill of StoryUp, Harry McCracken from Fast Company, Pete Pachal of Mashable, RJI Fellow Thomas Seymat and Veda Shastri of The New York Times.

The speakers will touch on the areas of augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality (such as Microsoft Hololens) including best practices. Seymat, formerly a VR editor with Euronews, plans to talk about his experience in immersive storytelling at the news media service.

While they’re in Columbia, the speakers will tour the 3-D Immersive Information Experience Laboratory at MU’s School of Information Science and Learning Technologies. They’ll mingle with other professionals during a social event at the StoryUp headquarters and check out the technologies Hill’s team is using at her startup.