With 'Road Tales', Volkswagen wants to bring imagination back to where it has always belonged: the back seat. 'Road Tales' is developed for Dutch children between 4-11 years old and can be downloaded for free. The app uses a custom developed story-engine that creates unique tales based on the location of the user. To allow the stories to react to the environment, the Amsterdam based agency has scanned all Dutch highways to identify objects like bridges, windmills, trees, petrol stations and other main objects to transform them into story elements.
"Interactive narrative systems attempt to tell stories to players capable of changing the direction and/or outcome of the story. Despite the growing importance of multiplayer social experiences in games, little research has focused on multiplayer interactive narrative experiences. We performed a preliminary study to determine how human directors design and execute multiplayer interactive story experiences in online and real world environments. Based on our observations, we developed the Multiplayer Storytelling Engine that manages a story world at the individual and group levels. Our flexible story representation enables human authors to naturally model multiplayer narrative experiences. An intelligent execution algorithm detects when the author's story representation fails to account for player behaviors and automatically generates a branch to restore the story to the authors' original intent, thus balancing authorability against robust multiplayer execution."
"Entale is the new podcast platform which adds pictures, maps, links, quotes and chapters to your favourite shows for a rich, interactive experience. "
"Ambient Literature is a two-year collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham, established to investigate the locational and technological future of the book. Funded through a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project is focused on the study of emergent forms of literature that make use of novel technologies and social practices in order to create robust and evocative experiences for readers. "
"Comprehensive collections, for storytellers, of articles, links, and information on the oral tradition and the art of storytelling - compiled by Tim Sheppard."
The engine of a non-linear video editor that can be used in all sorts of apps, not just desktop video editors.
MLT is an open source multimedia framework, designed and developed for television broadcasting. It provides a toolkit for broadcasters, video editors, media players, transcoders, web streamers and many more types of applications. The functionality of the system is provided via an assortment of ready to use tools, XML authoring components, and an extensible plug-in based API.
"A library any developer can use to put a video stream and get a playable url for it, while it gets ingested, stored, transcoded and distributed behind the scenes, all through non-centralised means. With this, one can easily build out-of-the box decentralisable video-powered web applications. Paratii.JS has early functionalities for handling tokens too, meaning one will soon be able to use it to set monetisation models for videos, collect earnings, participate in curation, and else."
"Video is better when the codec and transport work together.
Salsify is a new design for real-time Internet video that jointly controls a video codec and a network transport protocol. Current systems (Skype, Facetime, WebRTC) run these components independently, which produces more glitches and stalls when the network is unpredictable. "
"A gallery of interactive narrative graph visualizations created by the UCSB Transverse Reading Project, working with the materials of the Demian Katz Collection. "
"The move towards end-to-end IP between media producers and audiences will make new broadcasting systems vastly more agnostic to data formats and to diverse sets of consumption and production devices.
In this world, object-based media becomes increasingly important; delivering efficiencies in the production chain, enabling the creation of new experiences that will continue to engage the audience and giving us the ability to adapt our media to new platforms, services and devices."
"Doing things for a purpose through the (new) medium of broadcasting
From virtual reality uprisings to cooking shows that respond as you slice and dice, the team at BBC R&D share their very latest experiments and ideas."