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.
I’ve transcribed the voiceover from this video, below. Apart from the hype, it gives a pretty good introduction to what internet/TV convergence will start to look like.
I’ve been banging on about this for so long that you’ll have to forgive my teenage excitement about it. I was expecting this kind of device to have arrived in a big way by 2007/8. Most of it is not much more advanced than your TiVo, Sky+ or Microsoft system – but instead of their horrible clunky interfaces, this looks well thought out, with full search and web access, and a properly integrated browser. If only Apple had made their AppleTV more like this three years ago. I’m still not sure why they didn’t.
It’s long been my opinion that the way people really want to experience entertainment is on their couch, rather than on their laptops and at their desk. But I’ve found, when enthusing about this stuff over the years, that some people have had trouble imagining using the web on their TV from their couch – particularly because they’re confused about how they’ll control it. With a keyboard and mouse? A really big remote control? A Wii wand?
No doubt we’ll have to wait another pointlessly long time before internet TV systems start using the new motion-sensing videogame control systems.
