Michael G. Bass
Brown University
Department of Modern Culture & Media
Primary Advisor: Ali Momeni
Second Reader: Irina Kalinka
April 18, 2020
This thesis belongs to a moment in time — 2020 — when extended reality technologies (AR/VR) are emerging, making their way into American journalistic practice, and therefore altering the structures of public spheres.
This project is designed to be explored. The website itself is a piece of immersive media: it is interactive, modular, and you have complete agency over your experience. In fact, as you will soon learn, you have six degrees of freedom (6DoF): Read, skim, click, watch, move forward, and go backward.
I hope to guide your attention through the paper's pre-determined sequence, starting with the introduction and charting through four chapters. It is designed so you never need to hit the back button on your browser: read through the page, and follow the link at the bottom to the next chapter. Still, you're in charge: like a good VR experience, the narrative should be continuous no matter where you look.
Each chapter begins with its own Table of Contents (see right). The table allows you to navigate from section-to-section. This will come in handy in the behemoth that is Chapter 2. Try clicking on each underline to navigate this title page.
Case studies are filed under toggles (see right). When you click the arrow, it will reveal the contained content.
When you're ready to go, follow the link on the bottom right of this page to the Introduction. You can always return home to the Table of Contents by clicking the thesis title in the top left corner.