ENTRIES TAGGED "storytelling"

Perceptive Media: Undoing the limitations of traditional media

The BBC R&D department's Ian Forrester talks about the broadcast company's Perceptive Media experiment.

Recent research indicates a clear desire for interactive engagement in storytelling on the part of audiences. Researchers at the BBC are pioneering the concept of engagement and content personalization with their Perceptive Media experiment. The Next Web’s managing editor Martin Bryant took a look at Perceptive Media and its first incarnation Breaking Out earlier this summer. He describes the experiment’s concept:

“Essentially, it’s media — either video or audio — that adapts itself based on information it knows about individual viewers. So, if you were watching a game show that you’d never seen before, it might show you an explanation of the rules in detail, while regular views are shown bonus, behind-the-scenes footage instead. … Other smart ideas behind Perceptive Media include the idea that TV hardware could automatically recognize who was watching and tailor the content of TV to them automatically.”

I reached out to BBC R&D researcher Ian Forrester to find out more about Perceptive Media and the potential for the concept. Our interview follows. Forrester will further discuss the Perceptive Media experiment and its potential applications at TOC Frankfurt Conference on October 9, 2012.

Read more…

Publishing News: Consumers say the future of storytelling is all about interaction

How audiences want to experience stories, B&N's price of admission, and ebook bumping.

Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the publishing space this week.

Audiences want to be part of the story

Martin Bryant at The Next Web took a look this week at the first phase of research company Latitude’s new project, The Future of Storytelling. The group interviewed 158 pioneers in the media space to find out just how audiences want to experience stories in the future. Bryant reports that respondents’ “key demands are summarized in Latitude’s report as ‘The 4 I’s’: Immersion, Interactivity, Integration and Impact.”

(Click here for the full image)

Significant data from the study includes consumer desire to have an effect on story direction (think soap operas or serial TV dramas and deciding what happens to a character, for instance); to have stories told on multiple platforms and to cross over platforms; and to actually participate in the story in the real world. One respondent is quoted in the study report (PDF):

Read more…

A story takes shape amidst tweets and pauses

Novelist Reif Larsen takes to Twitter to tell a short story.

The novelist Reif Larsen did something on Twitter recently that showed how sometimes the best stories are those that arrive in small morsels, spaced generously.

Storytelling Through Book Spines

The Sorted Books project puts book spines to work as storytelling devices: The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book…

TOC Recommended Reading

On Being Positive in August (Adam Hodgkin, Exact Editions) Publishers need to consider the possibility that anything that can be published, will certainly be published digitally, and will, in principle, be available anywhere from many devices. That does not mean that it all will be free (why should it mean that?). But it does mean that it will either…

Short Fiction Renaissance Enabled by Digital

Gary Gibson makes a good observation about the forms of fiction enabled by e-readers. From The Digitalist: There's a potentially very positive aspect to ebooks in relation to short fiction I hadn't previously considered. Publishers rarely produce collections of short fiction in meaningful numbers any more because they long ago ceased to be cost-effective; much of my early reading…

Game Re-creates Lost Oakland Neighborhood

My hat's off to the release of a superb project out of the UC Berkeley Journalism School that re-creates a "lost" and once vibrant neighborhood of Oakland, 7th Street: There's much more to be done — developing a curriculum so grade school students can use the game to learn about 7th Street and the blues and jazz scene (we got…

Storytelling 2.0: Alternate Reality Games

Storytelling is no longer passive entertainment. Alternate reality games are one new way publishers are engaging readers and turning them into participants.