The Walter Cronkite School hosted its first Innovation Day on Wednesday to showcase new journalism technologies and promote forward thinking among students.
Eric Newton, the Cronkite School’s chief innovation officer, created the event that allows students to familiarize themselves with new technology.
Ian MacSpadden, director of broadcast engineering and operations at the Cronkite School, helped in the planning process and described the event as a way for aspiring journalists to hone in their skills in the new media landscape.
“The idea is to show them different technology tools -— software, hardware, platforms -— and say ‘Hey, here’s something that could be used for storytelling. How could you or would you possibly use it?’” MacSpadden said.
To achieve that mission for the event, the Cronkite School invited other ASU departments and companies, such as B&H photo and Sennheiser, to showcase potentially innovative tools.
In the packed First Amendment Forum, students maneuvered telepresence devices through the crowd while others watched film shot by camera drones.
Cronkite faculty occasionally announced a new winner of the ongoing Twitter-based innovation contest, set up to engage students in the event.
The ASU School of Arts, Media, and Engineering, a collaborative initiative between the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the ASU Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, displayed a virtual reality project called EcoRift.
The technology is currently being used to showcase national parks to people who couldn’t otherwise access them, such disabled or elderly individuals.
Associate Professor Garth Paine is optimistic about the technology’s emerging presence in the field of journalism.
He said the technology “really makes you part of the story,” referencing previous uses of VR in storytelling that included the United Nations’ work with the Ebola virus outbreak.
Another piece of technology that generated interest was a wearable device called Thync, a device co-created by an ASU professor.
Thync representative Lauren Guidas explained that the device could “shift the way you feel in a matter of minutes” by stimulating nerves in the forehead to make the user feel either more calm or more energetic — a technique that could offer nearly instantaneous stress relief.
Among the crowd of people discussing the technologies being showcased around them was Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan.
He praised the event’s ability to excite the imaginations of the students, calling the first of what he hopes to make an annual event a “spectacular success.”
Contact the reporter at Erick.Fowler@asu.edu.
