I am interested in the way that emerging technology can power creative storytelling.
Iâm talking about more than just making a traditional film or video-game using 3-D animationâthough I am a fan of both those mediums.
Following the thread of this project I started to think about wiki generated projects. Itâs not necessarily an emerging technology, but it does follow the same kind of rubric of creative freedom, of opening things up to the public and allowing for collective evolution.
So I started thinking about the SCP Foundation (Special Containment Protocols). Â Itâs essentially a mechanism for creative storytelling, a user generated archive of objects that do not exist. It takes the form of fictional government database full of bizarre and supernatural items that need to be protected from the public. Imagine if the warehouse at the end of âRaiders of the Lost Arcâ had an inventory.
Think of it as a kind of massive short-story project. This community of writers have built this wiki and populated with these weird little stories.
Itâs an experience that works best on the internet because itâs about discovery. Â Itâs organized like Wikipedia: Â you click on something and then see a link that catches your eye else and then click on that. Â Â
Itâs full of weird little discoveries like the Desert-In-A-Can.
I want to create an experience that takes this idea and expands it without diminishing the creative spark that makes it unique.
I want to create an interactive experience that takes these creative threads and follows them to their fullest extent. I want to take these great ideas and make them tactile. And I want to do this using 3-D Imaging, social gaming, transmedia storytelling and augmented reality.
Essentially, itâs a social media experience that brings together writers and designers in a collaborative space. You create a profile and sign up as an âArchivistâ or a âTechnicianâ (or both).
Archivists are writers they continue to do what they do which is to create the content. A technicianâs job is to search the archive for interesting items and then they really create these objects: making 3D templates that get shared with the SCP communityâthey are then fair game to be downloaded and printed on 3D printers.
The technicians can create their own mockups from scratch or, if theyâre neophytes, they can use our in-house 3D animator to pick from a library of shapes and create something a bit more simple. The point is that it is completely open-source and free-as-in-beer.
For the animation tool, I picture a software similar to Google SketchUp. A simple out-of-the-box 3D modeling software that allows the user to see vector lines and stretch 2D shapes into 3D
Thereâs no limit to how many images can be associated with a given entry. There could be 10,000 blueprints for Desert-In-A-Can. The SCP community can rate and share the designs, with the most popular one becoming the articleâs featured image.
Donât have a 3D printer. Thatâs ok, you can use augmented reality to manipulate a digital representation of the object. Done using an HTML 5 canvas. You use a toolkit to create a series of AR markers that correspond to a transformation matrix that you design or create using a generator. You can see an example here.
Another way to take advantage of the key story points offered by SCP is to think about how we can use emerging technology to bring these fictional objects into the âreal world.â
One way to do this is with the use of augmented reality. Say part of the entry on the site includes a specific location you can download onto Google maps. When you visit the location in person you take out your phone or Google Glass and point it at the specific location mentioned in the article: a deserted warehouse on the edge of the city. You instantly get an augmented reality image or experience. Imagine a photorealistic picture of after-effects of a Desert-In-A-Can experiment overlaid on that very spot (done using Unity a 3D development tool used for gaming). Though many Augmented Reality apps use AR codes, more complex ones use your phoneâs internal GPS, digital compass and motion sensors to detect where youâre pointing.
With no financial or technological barriers it would be cool to find a way to create an augmented reality experience without the need for AR markers in order to create a truly surprising and spontaneous (as I mentioned, they are already here some extent, but I mean a really fluid reliable method of panorama mapping and tracking) .
My aim here is to merge new technologies in an engaging transmedia storytelling experience.
The most obvious challenge here is cost. The experience is asking a lot from users at this point, their time, their money, their 3D Printing Materials.
I actually think that the demand for effort is the least costly thing here. People already devote a huge amount of effort to SCP for no recompense. With 3D printers becoming more common (and more affordable) the era of template artistsâpeople who sketch the raw data and allow the printers to do the manufacturing-- is about to begin.
With regards to augmented reality: that is a sketchy proposition because the current mechanism for object manipulation is not great (at a consumer level anyway). It requires a great deal of programming knowledge to create a good experience.
I feel like the aspect of this experience that would be cost-prohibitive is pure man-hours, not technology.
I donât think something like this is truly outside the realm of possibility. Brands are experimenting with a variety of media for multiplatform storytelling. There is a market for this type of thing. According to a Guardian article people are already starting to bootleg templates for gaming figurines (Warhammer, or whatever) and my experience scratches a very similar itch for sci-fi storytelling. Â Â
People want to be told engaging stories. That will never change. Itâs important as interactive designers and producers that we always remember that technology is always there to serve the story, never the other way around.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jan/26/pirate-bay-3d-printing
http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/11/augmented-reality-real-world/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEFH_r_X7kY
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webgl/jsartoolkit_webrtc/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev7PN04D56M