Magazine company Time Inc. made a recent announcement regarding the launch of Time Immersive, its mixed reality application. The new application is being utilised to exhibit the prospects of three-dimensional journalism.
Available for both the iOS and Android, the application will bring virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) projects to users.
A feature called “Landing on the Moon”, showcasing the Apollo 11 lunar landing’s 50th-anniversary celebration, will be the very first offering through the Time Immersive platform. It will give users a scientific and historically accurate cinematic representation of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Users can experience it in photorealistic three-dimensional augmented reality on any flat surface, anywhere.
Edward Felsenthal, the editor in chief and chief executive, Time, remarked that through ‘Landing on the Moon’ the magazine is expanding on several decades of trustworthy and reliable space reporting. He expressed that the new feature will help them freshly tell the story, in a similar vein to the company’s previous Emmy Award-winning documentary ‘A Year in Space’. Jimmy Dean is the sponsor of the project, which is being produced in association with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
A teaser created for the feature is available to users as a mobile web-based augmented reality experience. This teaser is helping a broader user-base gain an understanding regarding the technology.
Nick Partridge, head of strategic partnerships at the National Air and Space Museum, is also the co-director of the Apollo 50 feature. He emphasised that the Museum’s collection of Apollo 11 memorabilia is the largest globally and that it’s reporting during the Apollo-era played a major role in shaping the space race experience of Americans.
“Landing on the Moon” is being showcased as a production masterpiece, which is a culmination of upwards of two decades of research, and the artistic efforts of John Knoll, chief creative officer, Industrial Light & Magic. The three-dimensional components needed for production purposes were obtained from the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office (DPO) and Knoll.
Partridge revealed that the artifacts of the lunar landing mission have been uniquely brought to life. He also hopes that the AR feature can help new generation individuals experience a more advanced version of Moon Shot.
Erik Lohr, audio head at RYOT, an immersive studio, has contributed with spatial immersive sound design. Jeffrey Kluger, a senior writer at Time, has done voice-overs for the project.
Amazon’s VR creation suite Sumerian has been used as a platform for creating the Time Immersive application and mobile web augmented reality experience. Trigger Global Inc., a mixed reality studio, handled the development aspect. The app development also involved the use of the Yahoo News XR Partner initiative and is thus also available on the Yahoo News application.
Time is joined by many other journalism companies in their efforts to use immersive technology for news reporting. Business news company Quartz Media LLC had also released its own ARKit-based iOS AR application in 2017.
You can visit the Time Immersive website to download the application or get it from the iOS and Android app stores.
