Analog + Digital
Since I took the decision that it needs another format than ‘short movie’ to present Magpie to the audience, I’m always keeping an eye open for ‘new’ forms of storytelling and interaction.
Frédéric Kaplan’s talk gives an idea what could be possible with the book as ‘container’ for more than just two dimensional information or stories. Here are two more examples which I liked and which support Kaplan’s idea:
Monde Binaire is an interactive comic book invented and designed by Baptiste Milési. It comes together with an app for iPhone which allows the interaction with the book and gives access to additional content. This allows tho add moving image, sound or any other kind of information to the analog pages of the book. It combines the haptic experience of the book with the experience of sound, time, movement and interaction.
Tiptoi is a pen+book combination my friends daughter introduced me to. IDEO designed this pen for Ravensburger an European publisher of children’s books and games, they explain Tiptoi on their website: “Tiptoi is a digital audio learning system for children ages 4 and up. Kids use a brightly colored electronic stylus to touch pages or parts of similarly branded books, games, and puzzles. The intelligent pen “reads out” a story, explains the context, asks questions, comments on the right answer, formulates tasks, or inspires children to play on.”
It’s very interesting to have a nicely and detailed illustrated picture book which offers another layer of information accessible through a simple device like a pen. With the so called “digital paper” even tiny areas on a book page can contain codes which are readable for the Tiptoi pen.
The Tiptoi-book I played with had on each double page a very detailed panoramic scene (in German we call it ‘Wimmelbild’) like those we know from “Where is Wally?”. By tipping the pen on certain details, objects or characters, they pen would play some extra audio comment. A very nice combination of the traditional picture book you can take wherever you want and information in digital form.
TING is another pen which works in a similar way.