GUEST POST. Stepping away from Practices of Print: from Book to App (Zoë Aubugeau-Williams)

Minilab is a new digital production company created to deliver the most beautiful experiences in visual storytelling, learning and play that children can get their hands on.  Starting out as the digital R&D of Nobrow and Flying Eye Books, Minilab was set up as a new company in January of 2015 by Nobrow-co-founder Alex Spiro and digital creative James Wilson. At Minilab, we adopt the same basic values of great design of the highest quality that our sister companies are founded upon. We work with teams of talented animators and developers along with expert academics and the best illustrators in the world to ensure that we create the very best digital products for children that parents can rely on. We’ve recently released our first app, Professor Astro Cat’s Solar System.

 Professor Astro Cat first appeared in the book Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, by illustrator Ben Newman and quantum physicist Dr Dominic Walliman. Professor Astro Cat and his friends act as a conduit to spread scientific fact in a fun way that children can enjoy. He wants to make learning fun because when done with love and humour, learning is easy.

It has become one of the best-selling books on the Flying Eye Books list, selling 90,00 copies worldwide, having been translated into 13 different languages! With Minilab’s intention to create beautiful, educational, digital content for children and with this proven track record behind it, Professor Astro Cat became the obvious candidate for this new project. James has a background in animation and had previously collaborated with Ben on the creation of animated GIFs of Professor Astro Cat, so it was definitely his first choice for a project too.

One of the earliest stipulations of the digital Astro Cat project was that, even if we were going to be covering similar educational content, the app should not be a straightforward conversion of the book. Astro Cat’s world and mission has been reimagined to create a brand new digital experience. There are plenty of ebooks and enhanced digital books out there that stick to the tropes and practices of print. The end result tends to look and feel like a glorified PDF, which is something that we really weren’t interested in. We thought that if we were going to develop a digital experience that started life as a book, we should offer something that a book can’t.

 When designing layout for a book, there is usually only one destination size. For example, in the book, the whole Solar System is shown across a double-page spread.
With an app, the design of the layout needs to be flexible enough to work across a whole range of devices ranging from squarer tablets to wider aspects found in smartphones and smaller devices. With the Solar System in the app, we get to see the planets up close whilst giving the user the understanding that there is more content ‘offstage’. The zoom function is a great example of playing to the strength of the format.

The app was built using Unity 3D, a powerful C# based platform that can run both 3D and 2D animations. Having the facility to use simple 3D models for the planets makes light work of conveying the planets spinning on their axes whilst maintaining the 2D flat aesthetic of Ben’s artwork. This adds another level of information to the illustrations in the book.

Breaking the page was very important. The digital app needs an anchor for all the information to move away and come back to. While a book is a more linear experience in which you physically go back and reference things, if you choose to. It was very interesting to adapt this because you have to design in a very different way. You need to think about what the viewer can’t yet see and how to take them there without the viewer feeling instructed.

Books are what we know and love. They can be wonderfully rich and accessible sources of information, entertainment and inspiration. With a Nobrow/Flying Eye Book we go as far as we can to to offer something that readers can’t get anywhere else.  In the Astro Cat book, we’ve presented educational content within a fully illustrated context, demonstrating the power of visuals to illuminate text in print. With mobile devices taking up ever-increasing amounts of eye-time and the devices themselves becoming more and more ubiquitous, the digital revolution is not letting up. Children are both drawn to and adept at this new technology and we want to make that screen time matter. It follows that with our digital offering we should be offering experiences that users can’t get anywhere else. Animation can add an extra element of life to visuals; animating Astro was a great way of expressing his character through motion. But digital experiences really come into their own when there are things a user can affect - making passive consumption OF MEDIA, active. So there’s lots to uncover, prod, swipe, read and also… play. By playing to the strengths of the digital format, we have allowed children to explore their own personalized, beautiful and educational adventure through space.

Zoë Aubugeau-Williams
www.nobrow.net
www.flyingeyebooks.com

Karen & and the Interactive Narrative

If you've not met Karen before let me introduce you, she's been my very own life coach for the past few weeks - she has taken me on a very interesting journey.

A message from Karen from Blast Theory on Vimeo.

Karen is real person, who asks you questions over a period of ‘sessions’ to get to know your personality and build up a profile of you from the information gathered. The app is free for iPhone and Android.

When we first meet Karen she shows us her office and sets the first appointment. Exchanges take place face-to-face, as if you were using Skype, and appointments are set according to her schedule, not yours.

First meeting with Karen. Image credit: Blast Theory.

The exchanges aren’t actually happening live (the footage of Karen is pre-loaded), but she responds to what you say and seems to genuinely get to know your character. What's more she is quite unpredictable and the sessions evolve dramatically.

I feel like I am encroaching into 'spoiler' territory here, perhaps it would be best to download Karen, let her get to know you, and come back to this when you’re done. One small warning – she does produce a final report about you, but it costs £2.99 (she could have warned me first!). You don’t necessarily need the final report to enjoy the app though, as she feeds back a lot of this along the way.

Karen likes asking questions. Image credit: Blast Theory.

At its heart Karen is a story, one that evolves over a period of days, about a woman and how she has been shaped by life. By involving us in the narrative (i.e. making us answer psychological questions along the way) we are prompted to draw parallels with our own life and circumstances.

The time-based element of the app (the fact that it evolves unpredictably session by session over days) is an excellent device to draw us into the narrative as it asks us to invest our time and enthusiasm. The fact that Karen is a real person makes her communications seem personal and bring on that pang of excitement we get from real-life interactions.

The naturalistic set-up (i.e. using ordinary-looking locations, real-life scenarios and the Skype-like delivery) give the whole thing an air of authenticity, making the story credible and relevant.

The experience reminded me of the choose-your-own adventure books I read as a kid, but instead of the story being mythical or fantastical, it was down-to-earth and relatable. It made me wonder whether there is a market for choose-your-own fiction for adults? Something that, like Karen, is about real-life choices.

Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The nearest thing I have heard of that sounds similar is a new novel by Iain Pears called Arcadia made exclusively for the Apple app store.


 Chris

Real Words in Virtual Space: War of Words VR

A few weeks back I bought myself a new gadget for the princely sum of £2.60: Google Cardboard, a flat-pack virtual reality headset that you can make at home in under ten minutes. For the uninitiated Cardboard is effectively just a box with two lenses that you slot a smartphone into to view virtual reality apps.

Headset with the back open.

The one thing that drew me to Cardboard in the first place was an app called War of Words VR by the design agency Burrell Durrant Hifle, based on the BBC TV programme of the same name. The app is incredibly simple - it recounts Siegfried Sassoon's poem The Kiss through text, narration and an animated rendering of a WWI battle ground.

Stereo view of the title - the viewer looks down to play the sequence.

As the app starts the full text of Sasson's poem can be seen against a misty virtual landscape, with a gun in relief below the text. A narrator starts to read the poem, the gun then comes to life, moves through the space, a bullet is fired and the viewer can then choose to move their head to follow the bullet as it hits its target (a soldier). Once the narration and the visual action finishes the poem materialises (see image below) to be read once more.

Stereo view. Poem materialises at the end of the sequence.

I was frustrated at first that I couldn't read the poem in full at the beginning, to get my own sense of the text, however at the end I had chance to read the poem myself and I found my response was informed by what I had seen and heard.

What I was most intrigued about before was the idea of text floating there in a virtual space - the idea that moving through space could reveal sentences and a textual narrative might emerge. This app doesn't quite do that, but layering text between other elements in 3D space does allow for interesting juxtapositions; in this case the simplicity of the text layered against the gun at the beginning and the text layered against the wounded soldier at the end casts the poem in a different light.

I feel that the immersive dimension to the app moves the visual elements away from being merely illustration and more toward being a lens through which to view the poem.

I'm looking forward to seeing how other apps use the medium and whether there is an even more creative way to use text in virtual space.

{Chris}

#cybertext

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Generally, I prefer reading straightforward linear texts in straightforward linear books page by page in a non-confusing arrangement of thoughts where one idea follows another. Unfortunately, as I look around myself at this very moment I can see two open books to the left, a small pile of photocopied pages to the right, an iPad, a laptop and my notes all annotated, cross-referenced and collated to accompany my re-reading of Katherine’s Hayle’s Writing Machines (Mediaworks Pamphlet) . My reading, in fact, is an act of multilayered and multicursal pathway of linking, reading, connecting, proceeding. How very appropriate for this book, I suppose. 
How cybertextual!

The term cybertext was coined by Espen Aarseth in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997). Regardless of what it may sound like, cybertext is not a genre of literary or digital text, it is not a type of link or hypertext (even though hypertext can be present in cybertext) - cybertext is an approach to "communicational strategies of dynamic texts". The term itself is confusing in many ways (no clear definition, broad area of application, some ambiguous terminology - such as trivial/nontrivial effort), one thing is certain, though - it is not media, period or genre specific. It is about communication, interaction, performance within the text and with the text - it is not about literary or visual style.

"The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim.

...cybertext is used here to describe a broad textual media category. It is not in itself a literary genre of any kind. Cybertexts share a principle of calculated production, but beyond that there is no obvious unity of aesthetics, thematics, literary history, or even material technology. Cybertext is a perspective I use to describe and explore the communicational strategies of dynamic texts.(Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature )

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One of the examples of cybertext, that Aarseth gives himself is i-Ching (The Book of Changes) - an ancient Chinese divination book. Six yarrow stalks or tossed coins are used to determine the pattern of broken and unbroken lines in the hexagram. The pattern is then looked up in the book and the prophesy is read out for interpretation. The book does not form a linear narrative, but a multitude of possibilities and paths to navigate through.
Here is one of the online i-Ching reading sites  →  易經.

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 Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is another work that Aarseth mentions as a cybertext. Pale Fire consists of a 999-line poem, written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy line-by-line commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the poet, Charles Kinbote. Aarseth suggests, that a reader can choose between a linear or non-linear reading of the work, i.e. to read the poem first and then notes as one sequential story; or to keep jumping between the annotations and the poem.

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Nightingale’s Playground is a piece digital fiction by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston. It is an extraordinary interlinked work in four parts: a browser based read/walk-through, an e-book text, a virtual exercise book, a downloadable 3D immersive experience of Alex's house. The reader discovers the story himself through exploration of those four spaces.

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Here is one more beautifully produced piece of digital art! Hollowbound Book by Erik Loyer is an interactive response to N. Katherine Hayles’ book Writing Machines, in which a newly liberated book binding testifies to its liberation at the hands of Hayles’ theories. It is not a cybertext in it's own right (for what I understood about cybertexts). However, it can be considered part of cybertext that N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines (Mediaworks Pamphlet) is - a book that exists as an elegantly designed 3D object (also available as a PDF for a less elegant DIY binding) and an extension of the book Web Supplement, which includes the lexicon linkmap, notes, index, bibliography, errata, and source material. The reader/user can explore alternative mappings of the book's conceptual terrain with additional functionalities unavailable in print, then print insert pages to customize the book itself. 

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Children's books - like artist's books - often allow themselves the sort of ingenuity that adult books do not. A few blogposts behind I mentioned Myriorama or tableau polyoptique - a form of cards entertainment that became especially popular in the 19th century: a child was able to arrange and re-arrange the cards into any order to build visual narratives. Similarly, my own children in their own time could not have enough of Mixed Up Fairy Tales (Mixed Up Series) - a lighthearted contemporary split page book, where a child can make up their own stories using starting lines, names, events from well known fairy tales. It is the book that provided me with hours of piece on the plane - cybertext or not.

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Aarseth's cybertext is an idea of a multicursal text, which allows readers to biuld their own path though the labyrinth of reading - for example, through a possibility of physical rearrangement of narrative modules. Some of those objects mentioned above are books, while others are games or "whatever they are" (my very very favorite quote by Johanna Drucker in relation to digital book models). As cybertexts, they are a form of text - a text, which is a big metaphorical leap away from it's definition in linguistics. As reader-led narratives, they are a form of story-telling tradition.

 

PS. The idea of cybertext is  confusing in many ways - as I have mentioned above. I would be happy to hear from anyone with useful links on the subject.

 

A curious note that had no space in the text above:

At the start of the book Aarseth cites Penelope Reed Doobs discussion on physical and metaphorical labyrinths of classical antiqity and Middle Ages. She distinguishes two types of labyrinth paths: "unicursal, where there is only one path, winding and turning, usually toward a center; and the multicursal, where the maze wanderer faces a series of critical choices". The two ideas of labyrinth have co-existed until Renaissance, until the concept was "reduced to the multicursal paradigm that we recognise today". As a result we have since grown to regard linear and labyrinth and incompatible ideas.

  [Egidija]