Tool of North America are doing some very cool things with interactive video, like their new Touching Stories iPad app.
By touching, shaking and turning your iPad, you can navigate, unlock and reveal unexpected variations in each of these four “Touching Stories.” Shot by five different directors—and contained in one single app—these interactive, live-action, short stories evolve storytelling in ways that have never been done before on the iPad.
The iPad’s big touch screen is a much more intuitive medium for a hypervideo interactive story than a mouse or trackpad.
Although we’ve been expanding the scope of what we do, the initial idea to start Chapterplay as a company arose from my work with hypervideo and hypernarratives.
I’ve been mapping out and writing hypernarratives for about three years, gripped by the idea of developing immersive hypervideo stories. Over the course of this year, I’ve started to work on scripting fictional hypervideo narratives in earnest, though I’ve resisted publishing what I’ve been working on until now.
Last year, when YouTube launched their clickable hotspot & notes tool, Annotations, I’d been waiting for a popularly accessible hypervideo technology for so long that I assumed there’d be an explosion of creativity. And yet surprisingly little has been done with it – a few cute puzzles and Choose Your Own Adventure stories.
We’re going to pick out some examples of hypervideo to post here – and Mondays are going to be our regular hypervideo slot. So I figured I should start with my own little videoblog Choose Your Own Adventure story using Annotations from July 2008. It’s silly, but it conveys a simple idea of what can be done with hypervideo.
I’ve also been coordinating a large collaborative hypervideo video art project, which was on hiatus while I had a baby and moved countries, which is underway again and will hopefully be published in the New Year. And we’re also developing a longer hypervideo fiction script. More news of all that here as we progress…
