Recently i've been hearing alot about interactive television, ITV for short. When i think interactive television i think of interactive storytelling. Here, I would imagine a kindergarten teacher in a room full of students at story time. The teacher proceeds telling the story of The Three Little Pigs.
As the teacher goes on telling the story, the students add in their own little commentary. Gasping as the wolf blows down house 1. They are completely immersed in the story, imagining they are inside the house with the pigs, looking out their straw and stick windows at this scary wolf about to eat them.
The kids yell, run, pig, run. Or, fight the wolf little pig.
This is the form of story telling we are used to, a movie with a linear storyline, a book with a specific beginning and a specific end. The interactive television of today expands upon storytelling, but not to the point of interactivity.
If you apply todays ITV mindset to to the Three Little Pigs, you get this strange sort of storytelling that allows the kids to choose the fate of the pigs by voting whether they get away from the wolf or not. The straw pig votes 5 to 9 the pig survives. The wolf gets a nice meal, then proceeds to blow down and eat pig number 2. Pig 3's house doesnt get blown down, naturally, because its brick, but in the hands on the kindergarteners, the wolf sneaks in through the chimney.
Its true, that the second form of storytelling adds a certain amount of interactivity, but is the story really more interesting, or is it just something we find more interesting because its not the same story we all heard as kids? The problem with this form of interactivity is that nothing really changes. Its still the same story, with a beginning and an end, the only difference is that the end is slightly mutilated.
Now, what i imagine as true interactivity, is that which has some sort of control, yet is completely out of control. It feeds on the personalities of each person who is immersed in its story and makes them part of the universe. With the live or die approach, the story stays the same only because the characters never change. The fate of the characters change, but not the characters themselves.
Imagine now, the same kindergarten class, the same students, the same teacher. The wolf is hungry again, and ready for some pork. He goes off on his little trek to find the pigs, but before he finds them, a student yells out, "oops, he took a wrong turn". So the wolf continues on his path, the wrong path, until another student says, "look!, theres a house.". The wolf doesnt recognize this house, so he considers going up to and and blowing on the house anyhow. Because, of course, 90% of houses are full of pigs anyhow, theres a good change he'll have a nice meal. He huffs and puffs and blows the house away. A student yells out "theres a dragon!". Uh oh, the wolf thinks. Then puff, he's blown away by a huge dragons fiery breath. The dragon takes it all in and decides to go off and find some new building materials. A student yells out "The pigs are all building houses!". So the dragon takes flight and looks for three little pigs. He sees them and a proceeds to blow fire at all three houses, burning down the first two, naturally, and simply bouncing off the third. A student yells out "Now the pigs are roasted". The pigs indeed are roasted, but the dragon isnt hungry, he takes all the bricks from the third pigs house and brings them back to rebuild his house, better and stronger. Seeing the dragon come back with a brick house, the wolf decides to go take a look and find out where the bricks came from. When he gets there, he finds a sobbing pig and 2 other roasted pigs. A student yells out "Eat a pig!", so the wolf eats a roasted pig. Another student replies "No, he's too full now". Another student, "the other pig will eat one". So the pig and the wolf proceed to sit and eat their fellow pigs and have a nice dinner, until the dragon gets back, that is.
That tends to be a rather different outcome, but in the sense of interactivity, its a more true-to the source type of interactive storytelling. This type of storytelling represents things that have existed for years already. You'd recognize it as a form of adLibs, or actor improv.
This form of interactivity is already being practiced in the entertainment industry. It exists in the form of video games (such as Fable, or Grand Theft Auto), and live shows like "Who's line is it anyway".
The question that needs to be answered is... How do we play catch up in the film industry? Do we even try? Should we eventually stray away from interactive movies? Will they get boring? How can we keep them from getting boring?
Bottom line is... voting to change tracks in the storyline is cool, but interactive tv can do better than that. Lets raise the bar and figure out how we can make tv truly interactive.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Full Screen Mode
Its been a while since i've posted anything to this blog, so i figured i'd go ahead and share some of the thoughts running through my head at the moment.
As some of you may very well know i've been following Papervision 3D very avidly the last 4 or 5 months now.
Recently Flash Player 9.064 (something like that) was released which was actually released almost specifically for the papervision guys. One such update that really effects the future of 3D in the browser (and the web in general) is the full screen mode.
Full screen mode isnt new to this version of the flash player 9, however is adds a level of hardware acceleration, which has never been there before. This lets the flash player use your graphics card to render flash data.
This isnt only significant to Papervision actually. Its significant to web design in general. The big thing here is the Full Screen mode.
In the past websites have ALWAYS been constrained to specific proportions. Back in "the day" it was always 800 x 600 pixels for every website. Any bigger and you'd have to design the site to deal with a scroll bar. Vertical scrollbars were sometimes acceptable, but horizontal scrollbars might as well be a slap in the face to all your users. Once graphics cards became more efficient and capable of displaying higher resolutions the allowable size became 1024 x 768.
Designers have had trouble dealing with browser constraints for ages, but thats rapidly changing.
With the Flash Player 9 you can now initiate the full screen mode. This causes the flash area to take on the entire computer screen.
Usability people would normally have a fit over a web application taking over the screen, but i feel that they will become more accepting in time.
The reason most usability people would have a fit is the past problems with popups. Believe it or not, only a few years ago the world was plagued with pop-up advertisements. Now-days this is relatively extinct as people are starting to use Firefox more often.
Web designers have this agreement saying they will refrain from opening links in another window on a persons system. They would otherwise open these windows so that they can utilize more screen real-estate. They would also often remove toolbars from the browser window, which quickly became very annoying to users (this still goes on, but to much disdain).
Anyhow, back to my observation. I believe that web designers can now design with scalability in mind. For example, they can design for the smallest screen resolution in use, then leave it to the browser to expand from there. This is really only realistic when using flash or fairly advanced javascript to take care of scaling.
The full screen feature is not very intrusive, despite how it sounds. Full screen usually sort of implies intrusive operation. However, Adobe has done well to prevent abusing the system. The full screen effect is very cool and will allow designers more freedom without the worries of pushing users away because their site is hard to use.
Here's one of the first sites to really use the full screen effect well. It also uses papervision 3d, which of course makes it even better. The extra 3rd dimension opens up a whole world of possibilities to web designers.
http://www.neteye.de/
As some of you may very well know i've been following Papervision 3D very avidly the last 4 or 5 months now.
Recently Flash Player 9.064 (something like that) was released which was actually released almost specifically for the papervision guys. One such update that really effects the future of 3D in the browser (and the web in general) is the full screen mode.
Full screen mode isnt new to this version of the flash player 9, however is adds a level of hardware acceleration, which has never been there before. This lets the flash player use your graphics card to render flash data.
This isnt only significant to Papervision actually. Its significant to web design in general. The big thing here is the Full Screen mode.
In the past websites have ALWAYS been constrained to specific proportions. Back in "the day" it was always 800 x 600 pixels for every website. Any bigger and you'd have to design the site to deal with a scroll bar. Vertical scrollbars were sometimes acceptable, but horizontal scrollbars might as well be a slap in the face to all your users. Once graphics cards became more efficient and capable of displaying higher resolutions the allowable size became 1024 x 768.
Designers have had trouble dealing with browser constraints for ages, but thats rapidly changing.
With the Flash Player 9 you can now initiate the full screen mode. This causes the flash area to take on the entire computer screen.
Usability people would normally have a fit over a web application taking over the screen, but i feel that they will become more accepting in time.
The reason most usability people would have a fit is the past problems with popups. Believe it or not, only a few years ago the world was plagued with pop-up advertisements. Now-days this is relatively extinct as people are starting to use Firefox more often.
Web designers have this agreement saying they will refrain from opening links in another window on a persons system. They would otherwise open these windows so that they can utilize more screen real-estate. They would also often remove toolbars from the browser window, which quickly became very annoying to users (this still goes on, but to much disdain).
Anyhow, back to my observation. I believe that web designers can now design with scalability in mind. For example, they can design for the smallest screen resolution in use, then leave it to the browser to expand from there. This is really only realistic when using flash or fairly advanced javascript to take care of scaling.
The full screen feature is not very intrusive, despite how it sounds. Full screen usually sort of implies intrusive operation. However, Adobe has done well to prevent abusing the system. The full screen effect is very cool and will allow designers more freedom without the worries of pushing users away because their site is hard to use.
Here's one of the first sites to really use the full screen effect well. It also uses papervision 3d, which of course makes it even better. The extra 3rd dimension opens up a whole world of possibilities to web designers.
http://www.neteye.de/
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Internet Privacy on Campus??
So i cant help but be annoyed by the constant barrage of "spam" coming out of Ball State's mass email system.
I'm relatively protected from the outside world as I only use my email address in certain places that I'm sure wont result in spam. On campus, however, I dont have this option. Whether i like it or not, my bsu email address is open to whomever can get their message approved.
Which, by my observations, doesn't take all that much. You just have to have a legitimate "cause". Most often that cause is advertising some event.
I don't mind certain advertisements for certain events because even I find myself creating advertisements all the time for work and student groups. I think there's a limit tho, and I usually follow that limit. I don't push the advertisement on anyone, they can be free to indulge in the advert or they can ignore it, it makes no difference to me.
Now, obviously, Google has taken on a similar approach to advertising. Their adverts are less-intrusive and don't annoy the crap out of you when you see them. You can choose to ignore them, and no-one cares.
On campus, all I can do to ignore them is use "Mark as Spam" in Gmail. Now, that works and all, but it also sometimes blocks things that I'm interested in. When this happens i have to read through my spam section and weed out the "good" spam from the bad spam. I'd rather not have to do that, but on my end its inevitable.
My suggestion to UCS, or whomever is in charge of the mass mail list, is to target these emails to those who actually may want them.
Targeted emails are nothing new, advertising companies have been doing it for ages. They have people fill out forms telling who they are, what they're interests are, where they're from, etc... That allows them to target their emails toward customers who might actually read them.
If we're approaching SPAM on campus as just that, SPAM, then I think this is the best way to do it.
For example, if I were to fill out a form like the form below, with a list of emails that I wouldn't be against getting and reading. I'd likely be less annoyed by the emails I get. I actually might even enjoy receiving more of them.
This form would probably be best designed by a sociologist as it would be an entire project within itself.
-------------------------------------------
Name: Dustin Sparks
Major: Telecommunication + Multimedia
Minor: Digital Media, Computer Science, Business Administration.
Year: Sophomore
Age: 20
Classes: Class List
Class 1....
Class 2....
etc..
Interests: Sports
Mens Basketball
Football
Womens Volleyball
Interests: Student Groups
International Digital Media and Arts Association
Ball State Game Developers Club
Electronic Gaming League
---------------------------------------------
I'm relatively protected from the outside world as I only use my email address in certain places that I'm sure wont result in spam. On campus, however, I dont have this option. Whether i like it or not, my bsu email address is open to whomever can get their message approved.
Which, by my observations, doesn't take all that much. You just have to have a legitimate "cause". Most often that cause is advertising some event.
I don't mind certain advertisements for certain events because even I find myself creating advertisements all the time for work and student groups. I think there's a limit tho, and I usually follow that limit. I don't push the advertisement on anyone, they can be free to indulge in the advert or they can ignore it, it makes no difference to me.
Now, obviously, Google has taken on a similar approach to advertising. Their adverts are less-intrusive and don't annoy the crap out of you when you see them. You can choose to ignore them, and no-one cares.
On campus, all I can do to ignore them is use "Mark as Spam" in Gmail. Now, that works and all, but it also sometimes blocks things that I'm interested in. When this happens i have to read through my spam section and weed out the "good" spam from the bad spam. I'd rather not have to do that, but on my end its inevitable.
My suggestion to UCS, or whomever is in charge of the mass mail list, is to target these emails to those who actually may want them.
Targeted emails are nothing new, advertising companies have been doing it for ages. They have people fill out forms telling who they are, what they're interests are, where they're from, etc... That allows them to target their emails toward customers who might actually read them.
If we're approaching SPAM on campus as just that, SPAM, then I think this is the best way to do it.
For example, if I were to fill out a form like the form below, with a list of emails that I wouldn't be against getting and reading. I'd likely be less annoyed by the emails I get. I actually might even enjoy receiving more of them.
This form would probably be best designed by a sociologist as it would be an entire project within itself.
-------------------------------------------
Name: Dustin Sparks
Major: Telecommunication + Multimedia
Minor: Digital Media, Computer Science, Business Administration.
Year: Sophomore
Age: 20
Classes: Class List
Class 1....
Class 2....
etc..
Interests: Sports
Mens Basketball
Football
Womens Volleyball
Interests: Student Groups
International Digital Media and Arts Association
Ball State Game Developers Club
Electronic Gaming League
---------------------------------------------
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Monday, January 8, 2007
iTV? So what...?
iTV: Interactive Television.
A televised experience that involves two-way communication between the viewer and some form of televised content.Leo Burnett: http://www.leoburnett.ca
The Leo Burnett website recently won Best Navigation at Flash Forward '06 in Austin Texas. The interface simply consists of the words Leo Burnett and a big black pencil. Once the user attempts to interact with the page the letters split out of words and turn into "nodes" that connect more words and logos together.
Once a node is activated the interface rotate and zooms the screen to match the orientation and depth of the selection. The interface continues to zoom and rotate for each additional node beyond the corresponding letter.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
