Trends Forecast №3: Hybrid Experiences & Narrative Objects
As far as the evolution of media goes, screen based content and radio were a match made in heaven. Moving images, overlaid with matching audio, could create even more engaging, entertaining experiences, and what was born became the dominant form of media in the 21st century: film, television, home movies, web video; with the ability to record both sound and moving images, together, we had everything we needed to tell stories, wether they were fantasy or factual.
But now we’re living in the renaissance of 3D, with explorable immersive 3D worlds in VR, virtual 3D objects interspersed with our physical surroundings in augmented reality, and unprecedented control over the creation and fabrication of objects, with the rise of 3D printing.
Hybrid experiences integrate digital components into “real life” scenarios and environments. This includes AR and VR, and a whole new tool kit of narrative devices, such as smart objects and geo location.
Narrative objects are the natural extension of these hybrid experiences. From personal mementos to museum heirlooms and buried treasures, objects have always told stories. If a picture is worth a thousand words, objects are worth at least as many… sometimes they just need a bit of help — a translator — to get that story out into the world, and our digital tools are making that possible. Radio Lab has a great episode called The Explorer’s Club and the Sugar Egg, in which they told powerful, emotional stories that were rooted in personal mementos… and they had 3D printed copies of all of the objects in the stories, so people could actually touch them in their own hands.
Objects can now move and shape-shift, they can learn, and they can communicate; with the Internet of Things, objects can talk to each other, and take commands from us. All of this presents new opportunities to take stories off the page and off the screen, and out into the world.
