Movies, TV and video are great. Someone made all the decisions and you just get to sit back and watch. If you want to take control you play video games. Right? But HEAD-Geneva wanted to develop a hybrid genre so the group created IDNA.
Devised by Sylvain Joly, the story uses “spatial storytelling” to put a world in front of you. Though it’s an iOS-only prototype for now, IDNA looks amazing because all the scenes in the story are totally explorable in 360-degrees using the iPad’s gyroscope, and the plot customises and branches off into sub-plots depending on which characters and part of a scene you focus on. Choose Your Own Adventure is back.
One especially cool feature is that the audio is also in 3D in the sense that its levels are connected to different parts of the animation, so as you orient around the scene, different audio tracks come up and down. Sounds in the “background” recede relative to where your attention is in the scene. The prototype was hand drawn in Photoshop and everything was arranged in After Effects before being imported into Unity 3D. Pretty awesome. [Creative Applications]