Nico Patz (Deutsche Welle)

In MediaVerse, Deutsche Welle, SwissTXT and Vragments collaborated on creating Immersive Journalism Experiences, trying to enable a better understanding of a given (political or societal) situation by visualising positions – Who is closer to whom? Do I understand connections by looking at them from a different perspective? Experimenting with such new spatial presentations offers new potential to the work on accessibility. Project partner UAB, for instance, used workshops on co-creation of immersive experiences for raising awareness of accessibility and how certain techniques help various groups of people. MediaVerse supports fair sharing of media assets with other users, incl. monetization, but also automatic subtitling (transcription and translation into multiple languages), and Vragments’ authoring tool for interactive 360° experiences, FADER, automatically imports these assets with its subtitles.

Originally from the Humanities, Nico Patz has been working in collaborative research projects for more than 20 years with a focus on Innovation of Media and Journalism. The needs of journalists and content creators in the wide spectrum of content creation and interaction, in recent years especially in Immersive Experiences and Extended Reality, on the one hand, and making all sorts of content accessible to a wide audience on the other, have been his two major motivations.