Future Arrives Early: WSJ Adds 360 Panos to iPad App, Online ¹

by Dan Smigrod • Industry News • Tags: WSJ Adds 360 Panos, WSJ iPad App Includes 360 Panos

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has added 360-degree spherical panoramas to its iPad app and website to enhance its visual storytelling. The three panos (“panoramic composite photograph”) by Photographer Dustin Aksland in today’s WSJ iPad app help showcase the inside of Poet Maya Angelou homes in Harlem and Winston-Salem, NC.

The WSJ iPad reader has the options of:

• touch or gyro viewing
• zoom in/out
• portrait/landscape viewing

We applaud the WSJ – the second largest circulated newspaper in the U.S. – for showing newspapers how they can dramatically improve their digital storytelling with 360-degree panorama images. While its sister iPad app, The Daily, started using 360 panorama images almost two years ago at its inception, its the use by the Journal that will cause the stampede by daily newspapers across the globe to follow its lead.

Our view is that every daily newspaper – every news organization for that matter – will integrate panos in their digital storytelling within two years. We have previously written about 10 ways newspapers, magazines and TV can leverage pano tech, so we’re thrilled to see this major use by mainstream “print” media. (Please comment to this post if you have seen other major daily newspapers using 360-degree panoramas.)

InformationWeek Global CIO Columnist Patrick Houston wrote in April about how Visual Technologies Change The Rules (and featured TourWrist as an example). “A major shift in the information economy is taking place – right before your eyes. Literally. Words, while still a mainstay, are being supplanted by an immersive, deeper, richer, and increasingly widespread visual language – one that includes, but also extends beyond, high-definition photos and video,” writes Houston. TourWrist is among emerging companies that “will slap an exclamation mark on the trend toward an information economy dominated by visuals.”

We see irony in a “newspaper” once known for its iconic “visual signature” illustrations of photos leading the way in visual digital storytelling by newspapers.

“The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious,” said American Economist and Harvard Business School Professor Ted Levitt. When we launched TourWrist commercially in the 1st quarter of 2011, we imagined a platform for empowering consumers to shoot, discover and share 360-degree panoramic images via smartphones, tablets and computers. The Wall Street Journal use of panos signals that the future has arrived and it is now obvious.

PostScript

• WSJ uses 360-degree object tour (A “spin” around view of the exterior of a car) in its iPad app on 10/8/12)