Story in AR
Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station), 1895, les frères Lumière.
The book, the movie camera, augmented reality. What’s the connection? They are all technologies that influence the way we tell stories.
The book? Technology*? Yes, the book is a technological wonder. And we all know the book’s user interface too: on the edge is info that tells us what’s inside the book and who wrote it; we know that the pages inside the book are numbered sequentially; there is an organizing page at the start of the book that maps the book’s contents to those page numbers. There are numbered chapters, an index, lists of graphical elements, and other user interface tools to help us navigate and use the book.
The invention of the book, especially with Gutenberg’s moveable type, influenced the way we tell story. Book technology begat novels, glamor magazines, and text books. Book technology begat Spider Man.
When the movie camera was invented in the 1890’s no one knew how to tell a story with moving pictures. The first films were of commonplace occurrences — trains approaching, people dancing, and animals playing.
Filmmakers then set their stationary cameras in front of stage actors and filmed stage plays: using existing tools (the technology of the theater) to learn the new tools of filmmaking. Early films were one continuous, static, locked-down, silent shot. There was no story, no sound, and no editing. Each film’s length was determined by how much film was in the camera. The challenge to these early filmmakers was that there was no vocabulary for telling stories in this new medium. No one had yet invented the idea of an edit, a pan shot or a zoom.
Filmmakers had to create a vocabulary of film. Now you can film, edit, and distribute amazing films right on the phone in your pocket. This was certainly something unimaginable to the Lumière brothers when they released their first film, Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat in 1895.
I’ve been exploring the influence of technology on storytelling for over 25 years: from the worlds of print, multimedia, CD-ROM, and the early excitement of the emerging internet. These are all different technologies, with inherent freedoms, and restrictions, for telling Story.
We’re in the early days of augmented reality. We are exploring the technology. We’re playing with what we can do: setting AR on a tripod, as it were, and filming a train entering a station. We borrow vocabulary from other languages like film, app design, and video gaming. Just like the early filmmakers we have begun to create a vocabulary that is intrinsic to AR.
And that is what is so exciting. We are creating an AR vocabulary each time we solve a problem, each time we do one new thing in AR. We are learning how to tell Story in AR.
*Technology is anything that was invented after you were born…