The New York Times has a short quip on anime now produced for delivery and viewing on the Video iPod.
Why do I blog this? While it’s not on par with room temperature fusion in the innovation department, this kind of portable visual story telling is compelling. The portablility angle is exciting — having your movies, or favorite anime and such at the ready is cool. That’s one of the draws the PSP has for me — being able to have movies on the device for those long flights, or whatever.
I’d be interested in how those visual stories can be tied into the portability and mobility of the devices. Some ideas might be visual stories taht are location and time specific in some fashion. Perhaps integrating game elements into the story telling.
Sometimes I’m not entirely convinced about the possibilities for location-based visual stories. Other times, it makes perfectly good sense. But, in my mind, the challenges aren’t technical. Rather they are about providing a compelling, non-intimidating point of entry for iPeople and then just normal, non-alpha non-early adopters to include a location-based visual story into their idiolect of entertainment experiences. Think about the experience of going to the movies. It probably isn’t a stretch to think that many people go because you get to just sit there and be entertained, hopefully. The idea of sitting in a darkened box with a whole group of other people, mostly strangers, is so much a part of what a movie experience is that confronting the preconception is daunting. When I pitch the idea of out-in-the-world visual stories that are location-based, I encourage those who will listen to imagine a time 25 years in the future where sitting in a dark room to see a story is considered quaint and old-fashioned. The Video iPod makes it more possible to imagine, but how do you make the experience less intimidating than a game where you’re running around the city trying to find clues for the next part of an adventure? My guess is there about 7 people in the world who would do that in order to experience a movie, really, unless it were part of some kind of one-off stunt. And this is what I mean about the challenge of creating a non-intimidating point of entry.