Television has been trying to cram 3D technology into our eye sockets ever since it realized that offering some kind of gimmick with their product could distract some audiences from the fact that it sucks. 3D TV will only impress three groups of people: children, heavy LSD users who are out of LSD, and the people who helped bring it to a Best Buy near you.
HBO, however, has done something much more interesting and creative with interactive entertainment by applying the 3D concept, not to just the screen, but the story and characters. I hope you've got lots of newspaper down, because your mind is about to blow.
HBO's "Imagine" division has unleashed an online viewing experience that gives the viewer a true "fly on the wall" experience by letting them view multiple angles of a scene at once and view the exposition of the story through all points of view. It gives the experience some more longevity by forcing the viewer to hunt for scenes or characters they may not have seen that can lead them down different paths. It gives the whole experience a great sense of immersion and curiosity that if put in the right hands could make a viewing experience that can only be recreated with prescription drugs and a pitcher of margaritas.
[via Neatorama]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-01-2009 @ 10:24AM
JPN said...
This seems kind of annoying. I mean, its like saying, "We don't want to edit and direct the show - here's all three camera angles - figure it out in your head!" I mean I can't imagine managing three different angles of a show and really getting anything good out of it. I'm assuming you can't watch all the angles at once, though the above screenshot maybe indicates otherwise, and I could be wrong. OK, so in the example above, if you're watching feed two, you miss what's happening in food one with the guy behind the wall. So now I have to watch every scene two or three times over again just to figure out what they want me to see? It seems incredibly lame. It could be a good concept for a show, maybe showing the same twenty minutes 3 times from 3 different points of view, but unless someone boils down the important from the non-important (hence my directing comment above) it seems like a huge time waster. Personally, I don't want longevity in a show by having to watch it again if I don't choose to.
It's like a u-scan line at the store; it's convenient if you get to go quicker, but really, we're doing their job for them and not getting paid for it.
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10-01-2009 @ 11:55AM
Gill said...
Yea, just like those "choose your own adventure" books....screw those, you're just too lazy to write a straight line story for me.
10-01-2009 @ 1:19PM
asta said...
there's four cameraangels, and it works fine. You can switch very quickly. Try actually clicking the link and watching some of it before you start judging.
10-02-2009 @ 9:39AM
mdk said...
It'll never catch on with the average television viewer. Following the story is too much work. Americans are notoriously lazy people. When they are watching TV, however, their laziness level dips so low it actually sinks into a singularity of torpidness and briefly descents into the Underverse, an incoherent, low-energy sub-strata of our regular, everyday physical universe. (I'm being only slightly snarky here.) The concept as described in this article might win followers with gamers, however.
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10-01-2009 @ 12:34PM
person said...
it actually is a pain in the butt, it tells a story about fraud but in only 2 or 3 instinces they use this camera angle style thing and the overall story is confusing. what they do is they have a web and you click on all of the boxes to learn about the story, it has voice recordings,newspaper clippits, lots of stuff but in the end after you have seen everything you are still loads still confused. I don't know if this is for a tv show or what but if it is stand alone it is just awful
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