Interactive documentary “Journey to the End of Coal” puts its audience in the perspective of an investigative journalist looking into the deaths of Chinese coal miners. Built around content that might otherwise have been packaged into a multimedia photo essay, the project instead creates an interactive story world that users can explore at their will. When it was first released online by Le Monde, the site garnered 1.5 million page views.

This collaborative documentary offers a counter-narrative to political rhetoric about "Main Street" by creating a platform on which anyone can upload media and stories from one of the 10,466 Main Streets in America. Made with support from NPR and the Association of Independents in Radio, the project has documented 856 Main Streets to date.

An early New York Times experiment with multimedia storytelling, One in 8 Million uses ambient sound and an elegant interface to draw users into a collection of over 50 short profiles of New Yorkers, told through audio interviews and photographs. The proejct was featured at the 2009 IDFA DocLab, one of the first festival showcases of interactive documentary work.

“Prison Valley” is a first-person interactive investigation that uses game mechanics to bring users into the heart of America’s prison industry: Fremont County, Colorado. The project won numerous awards, including a World Press Photo first prize and Sheffield Doc/Fest Innovation Award. A linear film version was broadcast on ARTE and the interactive version was distributed by the newspaper Libération.

As a fellow at the University of Southern California, journalist Nonny de la Peña used Second Life and Unity3D to recreate the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center and simulate the experience of being a detainee. The project was the first in a series of experiments that de la Peña describes as “Immersive Journalism.”

This Emmy Award-winning web documentary was the first release in director Katerina Cizek's multi-year collaborative documentary project exploring life in high rises around the world. Cizek worked with academic researchers, local journalists and photographers to identify and capture stories in different cities - an innovative model for collaborative storytelling that brought together diverse perspectives and voices within a sylistically consistent interface.

Created by journalist Jigar Mehta and developer Yasmin Elayat, this participatory, crowdsourced documentary about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution attemps to capture the history unfolding in the tweets, cell phone videos, and other media created by the people protesting in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and those watching around the globe.

Created by photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Danfung Dennis, the Condition One iPad video player invites a greater feeling of immersion by giving audiences a limited degree of control over the camera’s point of view. Dennis' "visual technology startup" later went on to produce one of the films for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.

The National Film Board of Canada’s Bear 71 is a first-person documentary centered on the titular grizzly bear, tagged and tracked in Canada’s Banff National Park. Bear 71’s interactive interface depicts Banff as it might have been imagined by Big Brother. Migrating dots represent tagged animals like Bear 71 as they navigate through the supposedly wild landscape, never free from the watchful eyes of park rangers. Visitors to Bear 71 are also tracked, through their webcam and tagged with a number just like the animals (e.g., Human 1806291). Surveillance video and data feeds from Canada’s Banff National Park make environmental documentary “Bear 71″ a commentary on life in the digital age and represent a new type of digital data journalism.

Nonny de la Peña expands her "immersive journalism" approach in this virtual reality film that combines documentary evidence and 3D modeling to simulate the experience of watching a man go into diabetic shock at a Los Angeles food bank. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the project was one of the first mainstream journalistic applications of virtual reality technology. Nonny de la Peña's collaborator on the project, Palmer Luckey, went on to develop the Oculus Rift headset and in March 2014 sold the company to Facebook for $2 billion.

An experiment in crowdsourced journalism, “Curious City” gives editorial control to its audience by allowing listeners of WBEZ Chicago to suggest stories and accompany reporters while covering them. The project was supported by the Association of Independents in Radio through its Localore initiative, which paired independent producers with local radio stations to foster innovative community-based journalism.

This interactive tablet app and web documentary lets its audience members navigate between a 40-minute confessional interview with a former Guatamalan gang member and a stream of imagery that supplements her story. The project received awards from IDFA DocLab, World Press Photo and Sheffield Doc/Fest. It was also released as a hybrid documentary book and a linear film broadcast on ARTE.

This multimedia feature combines text, sound design, video and animation in a parallax scrolling interface to recount the story of a deadly backcountry ski trip. Snow Fall is credited by many in the field with ushering in a new kind of web aesthetic known as “scrollytelling”—enabling the viewer to scroll through a story and its multimedia components as opposed to clicking through them. The project received both critical acclaim and widespread audience attention, picking up a Pulitzer Prize, Peabody Award and a Webby Award while attracting more than 3 million visitors.

The data visualization Out of Sight, Out of Mind gives weight to the stark facts and figures of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, urging viewers to reflect on the life and death realities hidden behind the numbers.

"Sandy Storyline" is a participatory documentary that collects and shares stories about the impact of Hurricane Sandy. The project uses storytelling platforms like Vojo and Cowbird to collect audio, video, photography, and text stories from residents and citizen journalists. The online archive features more than 250 stories, testimonies, and visions for the future. Sandy Storyline is the winner of The Tribeca Film Festival’s 2013 Bombay Sapphire Award for Transmedia.

ProPublica healthcare reporters Marshall Allen and Olga Pierce, along with Tom Jennings and Ocupop’s Michael Nieling, collaborated on an interactive documentary about risks for patients in the healthcare system called Hazardous Hospitals, which was put together in four days in 2013 and covered issues of quality of hospital care and patient harm. The story is told through video interviews, GIFs, text, questionnaires, and social media.

The Guardian’s interactive documentary feature Firestorm explores the onslaught and aftermath of a devastating brush fire in Tasmania. Using video as the backbone, it combines text, full screen images and audio to more fully immerse readers. The project was one of the first successes from The Guardian's multimedia special projects team.

The result of a yearlong collaborative reporting effort between FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman, the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, and the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), "Rape in the Fields" exposes the abuses of migrant women working in fields and packing plants. The project was presented as a documentary feature airing on FRONTLINE and Univision, as well as a feature article, infographic and animated short film produced by CIR.

To produce this interactive documentary, independent filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon collaborated with the residents of McDowell County, West Virginia to tell the story of population decline in the rural United States. The project began with a series of participatory storytelling workshops and a community news website that helped generate the content and framing for this Peabody and World Press Photo-winning web documentary.

Part of Katerina Cizek's multi-year Highrise project, this storybook-inspired web documentary uses rhyming couplets to detail the 2,500 year history of the highrise building and the people that inhabit them. Users were invited to submit photos of highrise living that were included in the final chapter. The unique collaboration between the New York Times and the National Film Board of Canada led to a Peabody and World Press Photo Award.

This "documentary game" allows users to explore the social, economic and environmental effects of an oil boom in the northern Alberta town of Fort McMurray. Directed by David Dufresne, one of the creators of Prison Valley, the project combines first-person interface for exploring the area and a SimCity-like dashboard in which users can debate and vote on the issues. The project was distributed by three newspapers and selected journalists acted as "superplayers" writing about their experiences in the game.

This popular interactive feature from the Guardian combines text with documentary-style video interviews and interactive graphics to explain the significance of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations.

One of National Public Radio's first attempts to produce interactive visual storytelling for the web, this project describes the economics of the garment industry by following the journey of a single t-shirt around the world. The project was made possible by a Kickstarter campaign that raised $590,000, more than 10 times the producers' original goal.

A collaboration between the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Guardian U.S. Interactive Team, this project follows the movement and treatment of toxic waste around the United States, using interactive visualizations and animated graphics to supplement in-depth investigative reporting.

“The Shirt on Your Back” is an interactive documentary about the Rana Plaza disaster, the deadliest garment-factory accident in history, and the global garment industry. In this interactive documentary, Guardian journalists trace the lifecycle of a shirt as well as the human cost of the Bangladeshi garment industry.

Led by NPR, 2014 interactive documentary project “Borderland" follows public radio host Steve Inskeep as he travels along the U.S.-Mexico border and reports on what he found there. With national tension building at that time around the immigration debate, Borderland endeavors to illustrate—in multimedia vignettes that include audio soundscapes, narration, photography, maps, and short videos—the U.S.-Mexico border as a vital place on which people depend to live and work. While the concept of an interactive documentary told through different forms of media was not new in 2014, the production of Borderland involved new collaborations across institutions and generated new work flows between organizations and departments that did not previously exist.

This interactive documentary produced by the NFB and The Guardian imagines what the seven deadly sins look like when updated for the digital age. Featuring "digital sin" confessions from a broad spectrum of contributors, including folk musician and activist Billy Bragg, comics Josie Long, Ophira Eisenberg and Bill Bailey, actress/comedian Mary Walsh, Seven Digital Deadly Sins reveals that these celebrities use and abuse the internet as well.

A collaboration between the Guardian and the digital agency Kiln, this project reimagines the historical documentary in interactive form, offering perspectives of 10 historians on the First World War through original reports, interactive maps and short video segments featuring rare archival footage.

This project from Al Jazeera places users in the role of investigative journalist uncovering the story of illegal fishing operations off the coast of Sierra Leone.

This long-form investigation into the use of pesticides in California's strawberry industry allows users to personalize the story by looking up their home address and exploring an interactive map.

The product of a joint investigation by the New York Times, ProPublica and Frontline, this web documentary uses the computer that was traced to one of the Pakistani terrorists who masterminded the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. Frontline makes this story into a Web-based experience and an app that would allow users to explore the data, just as the intelligence agencies had done.

One of the first virtual reality newscasts produced by a major news organization, this coverage of a protest against police violence in New York debuted at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier program.

Two combatants from opposite sides observe each other in a virtual reality environment. The viewer is in the middle. At the crossroads between neuroscience, artificial intelligence and storytelling, The Enemy takes the viewer on an odyssey through some of the most contested conflicts of the world to acknowledge people’s humanity.

Director Brett Gaylor explores privacy, surveillance and the web economy in this personalized web documentary delivered in bi-weekly chapters across multiple platforms. The project was co-produced by Upian, National Film Board, ARTE and Bayerischer Rundfunk, and distributed through additional partnerships with Radio-Canada, AJ+ and Radio Télévision Suisse.

Borrowing techniques from an essay film, this web documentary tells the personal story of the director's experience surviving a tornado. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, the project brought together PBS documentary series Independent Lens, digital agency Helios Design Labs and the Washington Post.