Twenty-two projects taking part in the Innovation Challenges launched by Google News Initiative in the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey were selected out of 329 initiatives.

Google News Initiative published the details and diverse ideas of these projects on July 14, 2021. Among them were “Tiny Hand” and “Frontline in Focus”— an initiative that was launched more than two years ago and focuses on the stories of people living in warzones and areas of conflict. 

While “Tiny Hand” focuses on children’s stories and what they face in conflict regions, Frontline in Focus works on covering a variety of stories about people on the frontline. This coverage aims at serving different foreign media and humanitarian organizations that find it hard to cover stories in warzones or even reach such regions. 

Today, the greatest challenge that the two websites attempt to overcome is conveying and bringing the events taking place in warzones and conflict regions to your TV screen, or rather bringing you to the scene so that you could see the complete picture. To do so, they use the Virtual Reality (VR) technique as well as 360-degree videos.

Here is the summary of the project:

Summary: Bringing the frontlines to your screen, by using the latest trends and tools of technology to shed light on the real life of people and children who live in conflict zones, covering the suffering and the impact that war leaves on all of them.

These powerful tools were the reasons behind establishing the digital platforms, “frontline in focus” and” Tiny hand” in Arabic and English.Coverage in war zones decreased because of travel restrictions and high expenses, outbreak of Covid-19 and other difficulties related to access to war zones. On the other hand, the traditional methods of coverage are not enough to reflect the reality there. 

Solution: Placing the audience inside the war and conflict zones, shift the newsrooms to open areas and all the places which are hard to reach and difficult to visualise. All this could be achieved by using VR.