Casey Prottas

(Video by Mady Mills/USA Today College)

Swipe down, swipe up, tap once, tap twice, wink to take a picture. Observing a person wearing and using Google Glass can be mesmerizing and even puzzling for some, but for others, this piece of technology offers endless possibilities that could potentially change the future for newsmakers and consumers.

When digital journalism professor Robert Hernandez, from University of Southern California, won a Twitter contest to get a pair of Google Glass eyewear, he soon realized that he held the key to something different and unique. Something a journalism school had never worked with before.

After talking with a group of engineering students at USC last spring during a meet-up on campus about Google Glass, the cogs began to whir. The students’ excitement sparked an idea to start a class about Glass and journalism, but not just any class.

“The students, when we first met, were more excited with what I was more excited about, which was collaborating as equals,” Hernandez says. “Glass is awesome, but to be able to do something that is not hypothetical, that they're not learning from a textbook, but they're putting into practice together, was what was really exciting.”

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Hernandez tweeted out that he needed help with crafting the layout and syllabi for the class and before he knew it, he was hosting a meet up with a variety of students ranging from journalists, to programmers, to public relations. After collaborating and brainstorming and even meeting up over the summer, Glass Journalism debuted as an official class this fall at USC.

“It's definitely a unique experience because we are all from different backgrounds and talents, however we’ve all come together to try and figure out what the future of storytelling will look like,” says Serhan Ulkumen, a junior in the class studying media arts and cinema. “The biggest challenge so far has been keeping a balance between our fantasy or dream app ideas and the reality of where technology currently is.”

The class is currently brainstorming and pitching ideas for original news apps for Glass that will help journalists with content creation and users with content consumption. They are also working towards creating a content management system for Glass that will allow users to compile and organize different types of media.

“It doesn't feel like a class, at times. The class feels like a startup,” says Sara Clayton, a senior in the class studying public relations. “Every class period, we always have some sort of hands-on brainstorming session or a guest speaker who talks about their experiences with Glass.”

Hernandez explains that Glass offers an entirely new perspective because the device is always powered on and directly on the face of the user. The projection screen is slightly over the eye and this will influence the shape of an article, a video story, an audio story or any type of story a journalist could put together.

“I think one of the coolest things about Google Glass is how intimate it can make journalism,” Clayton says.

The camera on Glass can be used to explore Point of View video pieces, which could potentially give viewers a more personal experience while watching and involve them on a different level.

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“The goal with Glass is you're no longer looking down at your phone, you're looking out into world,” Hernandez says. “This is a different level of contextual storytelling because it knows where I am and where my face is pointed.”

The students in the class are excited to be paving the way for this new medium and even though it’s still in the early stages, they are excited to have meet-ups in the near future to discuss their projects and test out prototypes of their new apps. They realize that Google Glass has not become fully mainstream yet, but they jumped at the opportunity to see what the future has in store for both the technology and journalism world.

“There's a lot of people that have been dismissive too soon about this type of technology that really, we need to embrace and develop sooner rather than later,” says Professor Hernandez. “Hence, the creation of my class.”



Casey Prottas is a junior at University of Southern California.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.