Excerpt from The Atlantic article by Steven Heller:
"This year Van Dam has taken maps into the fourth dimension his 4DmApp, which does more than get people from here to there. "In a world of ubiquitous gaming play, value is king," Van Dam explains. "The playfulness of maps stems from being miniatures. As miniatures, maps show us realities we couldn't otherwise see. They put us in charge and present the world from God's perspective." The 4DmApp takes this one step further and empowers the user to choose a personal perspective. "You can hover above the top of 1 World Trade Center, tilt the phone (which engages the accelerometer) to shift the ground under your virtual feet, then fly through cartographic space to land at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage with lightening speed—and you feel it in your tummy. It's entertainment, discovery and play in the service of getting from here to there."
Van Dam is also including "geo-social layers" to allow "transactions that can be recorded and shared live on the map." The goal is to create "sticky points of engagement" within this miniature landscape to deliver what he calls "live, measurable interactions by the user in both the virtual and physical worlds."
The 4DmApp is graphically distinct in the way basic the map indicators—streets, avenues, etc.—are integrated into the landscape. Van Dam has accomplished this by merging map and scale-model metaphors to make urban space legible for all audiences. "The 3D buildings are the beacons in this miniature information landscape made up of type, symbols, pictograms, and other graphic abstractions," he explains. "But it's the combination of lighting and shadows cast, camera angles, and movement through space that improves on physical reality to create a magical and typographical miniature world you can actually enter."
From YouTube:
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Which is where Layar Vision changes everything: What if you could hold your AR-enabled iPhone up to something in real life that you just came across--say the cover of Fast Company magazine--and get an overlay of data about it, perhaps an option to click to this webpage or a special offer of subscriptions? That's something Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, founder of Layar, suggested to us is one of the most powerful exploits of the new tech. Vision really does behave like Google Goggles does: When Layar "sees" an item it recognizes, wherever it may be, it returns data to your phone immediately. In Google's case it's just it's traditional search result list, accessed in a very visual way. In Layar, it results in whatever action has been associated with the object. All it takes, Maarten explains, is for the developer to choose the planar object they'd like to be recognizable, upload it to Layar's servers to act as a fingerprint, and then the app does all the rest.
The object can be anything from a poster to a magazine to a small item, and the action can be anything from overlaying a 3-D graphic to playing a video file to sending you to a webpage. Maarten was careful to note "I really think that for the publishing industry it'll work best" at first: "Say you just wrote a book and want to market it. Upload a picture of the cover to our server" and then you can "link a bio, a photo of the author, a video or you can show a 3-D object, for instance a spaceship if it's a sci-fi novel." And from there, for the user who sees the AR effect, it's "so easy then to say 'I Like this' or I'll Tweet this or comment on this," perhaps meaning the "real world can now be very easily linked to the digital world."
Instantly there's the power of this system, laid bare. Layar developers really can "hack reality" now. Imagine, Lens-Fitzgerald suggests, that there are really practical uses: "Say you're buying chicken in the supermarket, and you hold your phone over it--then you can see there're antibiotics in the meat" for this particular package, because a developer has made a food facts database, and uploaded an image of the typical store chicken label, linking it perhaps "to an article by Reuters about it". That's one way to circumvent, or subvert, advertising, but of course advertising may be one of the earliest beneficiaries of this development, alongside publishing. As a magazine, you could upload your next cover art to Layar, and give the first 1,000 visitors who click on the Layar-discovered hyperlink a prize or gift of some sort. Meanwhile advertizers could plop a 3-D image of the latest sleek concept car onto the flat 2-D image in a two-page newspaper ad, adding in all sorts of interactivity and detailed specs.
Dead Space: it has novels, comics and an animated movie. But what do these really add to the experience?It has become routine now. A few weeks after the announcement of any big new game release, there will be another thrilling revelation: a tie-in comic book series, a novel, a made-for-TV movie.
Inevitably, it will be a prequel, released a few weeks ahead of the game it accompanies, or it will slot into the timeline between subsequent titles in a major franchise. "We're excited by the opportunity to flesh out our backstory and give our fans more of an insight into the deep narrative," a producer will robotically intone. When of course, much of the excitement revolves around the marketing potential of the linear tie-in: every new story platform is an advert.
This used to be called merchandising, but now we must use the term "transmedia storytelling". Nowadays, developers are aiming to produce narratives so compelling that they transcend platform limitations; a high-tech realisation of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk concept. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, however, Epic's European territory manager, Mike Gamble, warned studios away from becoming obsessed with crossovers projects:
It's really easy to be distracted by shiny baubles, whether that be pre-vis on films, doing stuff for car manufacturers, whatever it happens to be. In the end you can end up chasing these things and your core business is then neglected.
But there are deeper problems beyond merely getting a bit distracted. A key issue is that the linear content is rarely of a similar quality to the source material. Assassin's Creed the game is an astonishingly rich and detailed interactive universe, but the novelisation, Assassin's Creed: Renaissance, is lumbering, stilted and repetitive.
Original post guardian.co.uk
Further excerpt:
"But so far, another core failing has been the sense of platform dissonance. Transmedia is supposed to be about telling a story seamlessly across multiple formats – this is the vision that guided, say, Tim Kring's fascinating project Conspiracy For Good, and the ARGs accompanying the likes of Portal 2 and TV series Numb3rs.
But in the mainstream video game sector, novelisations and movie tie-ins tend merely to extend background narrative detail – nice for hardcore fans, but never a fundamental element of some over-arching story experience. There is also rarely a sense of interaction between gamers and adaptations..."
How Do You Integrate a Marketing Campaign?
“I know that I waste half of my marketing money, I just don’t know which half,” is an oft-repeated quote attributed to many different people. Like most popular aphorisms, it’s witty while retaining an essence of truth.
Over the years, we’ve gotten pretty good at measuring individual mediums, such as TV, but effective marketing mix models have eluded us. However, it should be clear by now that we’ve been looking in the wrong places.
How pacemaker cells in our heart sync isn’t much different than consumers boycotting Nike or a line going around the block for a surprise hit movie. Learning how contagion spreads on a college campus is essentially the same as how brand sentiment moves through the marketplace.
In other words, specific placements aren’t nearly as important how marketing messages travel through networks of ordinary people. Moreover, as network theorist Duncan Watts points out in his new book, Everything is Obvious, mobile and social media are giving us a whole new tool that set will revolutionize how we understand and practice marketing.
12:13 Coppola is sad that all entertainment is canned and pre-digested. “All we have that is vaguely alive are the concerts you go to, some theater and sports. […] “There is a yearning for the live to be put back in cinema.”
12:14 Coppola is talking about how he wants to go on tour with Twixt to make his “Halloween movie” live “and perform each film [for each theater with his sound guys], a different performance for each of them.”
12:16 Coppola produces his iPad and shows how he could custom edit his movie for each theater. “I can control it all with the touch of this button — now where the hell is it?” This sounds really cool. “I could perform it on the fly.” He said he will try it for the Comic-Con audience but it will be a dress rehearsal. “Theoretically, I could push a shuffle button and show you 20 versions of what I just showed you.”
12:18 Coppola gets Hall H cameras to zoom in on his iPad screen. He says that he will perform scene 30 live for the audience.
12:20 The live performance is in gear. Different shots are shown with different music. Coppola sings along. He cuts the clip short and tries to come up with a different version. He asks Kilmer to entertain the audience.
12:21 Kilmer: “Uh, it was really fun to work with a genius. […] I want to go on tour with them. Just hang out.”
12:22 Val Kilmer sunglasses update: They’re still on even as Hall H goes dark to screen another clip.
12:23 Coppola asks to restart the clip. A tech guy jokes, “30 nights of this!”
12:24 Coppola throws to a new sequence variation. This time, he provides the narration live and makes it up on the fly. Very cool. It’s like he is DJ-ing his own movie. Cut to the scene of Kilmer at the book signing again. We see difference shots than we saw before. KIlmer throws a pen at the wall in frustration. Kilmer’s character is alone at his computer, trying to write his story. He reads aloud different lines than we heard in the original clip. This time instead of doing a gay basketball player impression, he does impressions of a steamboat captain and a cowboy. He is pouring himself scotch. Dan Deacon is composing new music spontaneously.
"Pedro Monteiro passed along this in-depth look at digital narratives. Monteiro is a consultant for INNOVATION Media Consulting and coordinates tablet publications for Impresa Publishing (Expresso, Visão), a division of Portugal's largest media company. This article first appeared on Monteiro's own website Digital Distribution.
The way we tell stories in the print media has been, mostly, the same for some time now. Space constraints and graphic layout have made the narrative flow a broken one. With the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, it is time to rethink how we produce and present our stories.
With this article I want to explain why the broken narrative experience happens and how we can find ways to prevent it on digital publishing. Furthermore, I will propose a way of planning, producing and designing narratives that won’t suffer from this problem. In the end, I’ll take a fictional story and share how I would plan it, from production to presentation, using the ideas proposed on this article.
For this article I will refer to linear narrative – that with a beginning, middle and an end. Think of it has going to the theater to watch a movie. You go into the room and the movie starts. You can be watching Memento, a traditional non-liner screenplay. The movie goes forward and backward in time. But as a part of the audience when you experience the going to the theater to see Memento, you’ll be in a linear narrative: you go, you watch the movie (regardless of it’s timeline narrative), the movie ends, you get out of the theater and your linear experience ends. You went to the theater and watched a story, without interruption, regardless of how the story was told.
Likewise, when describing non-linear narratives, I will not be focusing on their timeline, but on interruptions of the narrative itself. Like going to the movies to watch Memento – and being interrupted in the middle by a documentary about the film itself, and then having the main film start again where it was interrupted. You went to the theater to watch a story, but the experience was interrupted by another story, regardless of the way both stories connected.
Let me start with a simple story. Think about a lecturer who may have inspired you – if you can’t remember one, I advise you to visit TED’s website, where you will find amazing people, with amazing ideas, telling amazing stories.
OK, now that you have a lecture as an example, let’s analyze it. What makes it such a brilliant storytelling experience? Apart from the speaker’s ability to deliver a good story and from the talk’s content, a good lecture is a linear flow of information, with a beginning, middle and an end, or conclusion. That’s the basic of a story; we’ve learned how to do it from an early age...."
Excerpt:
"...When using minimalism in web design, does this art form give designers permission to leave off important navigation tools or icons? Not at all. Minimalism is the act of stripping the form to its very basic, necessary elements, the keyword here being “necessary.” No true minimalist would approve of those designs that leave the audience confused or unsure. The idea is to make the message more clear, not more hidden.
In fact, in a previous article on UX Booth titled “Less is More: Simplifying your User Experience,” Trent Martens points out that we must lead our audience to a decision, that too many choices can overwhelm. I believe that the opposite is also true, too few of choices and the audience may feel trapped or restricted.
With this in mind, take a look at the following sites that most would agree are minimalistic in nature. The first five of the following websites have accomplished very impactful minimalist designs, while the last two go too far in their use of limited design elements resulting in very unusable formats.
A highly effective minimalist website incorporates clarity and organization in design. The few elements a minimalist site does use (headers, menus, etc) must absolutely be consistent in order to create a sense of cohesion. Just as in any other minimalist design, the removal of any single element would render the site useless.
There are plenty of roundups for excellent minimalist websites, including 40 Beautiful Examples of Minimalism in Web Design, 50 Inspiring Examples of Minimalism in Web Design, 25 Beautiful Minimalistic Website Designs, 30 Examples of Extreme Minimalism in Web Design, and much more. You will notice the common minimalist principles in each website when viewing these roundups, as shown in the examples following...."