Immerj: A novel system for democratizing immersive storytelling

Immersive technologies such as 360° cameras and head-mounted displays (HMDs) have become affordable to the average consumer, opening up new audiences for storytellers. However, existing immersive post-production software often requires too great a technical or financial investment for smaller creative shops, including most of the country's newspapers and local broadcast journalism organizations. Game engines, for example, are unnecessarily complicated for simple 360° video projects. Introducing Immerj - an open-source abstraction layer simplifying the Unity3D game engine's interface for immersive content creators. Our primary collaborator, Professor R.B. Brenner, director of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, organized hands-on demos with our team and journalists and designers from some of the top news organizations all over the country in order to follow a human-centered design process. In just over one year, a small team of undergraduate researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has created a potentially disruptive democratization of technology.