Creating an Immersive Experience
About a year ago I had my first experience with immersive authoring. I was tasked with creating a digital publication in iBooks Author. In order to have more control of the project, I did the majority of the publication’s layout in InDesign first. This was my first foray into both programs and it proved to be a fantastic learning experience. I chose to make my iBook about The Legend of Zelda video game franchise. I chose this subject matter because I enjoy gaming as a hobby and it is one of my favorite video game series.
Learning from Mistakes
The most important thing I learned from this project was the importance of planning. I learned this lesson the hard way because I didn’t do enough planning on paper before jumping into the software. The project was more difficult for me as a result. Having gone through a project where I didn’t spend enough time planning has reinforced the importance of taking the time to do so. I now spend a lot more time in the planning phase of a production.
While I didn’t spend enough time sketching out layouts for individual pages, I still did some sketches before creating several pages. It’s not like I didn’t do any sketches, I just wish I had done a lot more.
For many of the pages in the iBook, it took more time to create that page because I didn’t already have a layout in mind in my sketchbook. This is a bad way to go about creating a digital publication and I can attribute it to my inexperience at the time.
Interactions Create a More Immersive Experience
The emphasis of this project was to create an immersive experience. While aesthetics certainly help with this goal, adding interactive elements greatly enhances immersion. There are two features of my iBook that I feel best showcased interactive elements. The first was the page dedicated to the Triforce, a symbol at the core of The Legend of Zelda series. The Triforce is a large triangle made up of three smaller triangles that represent wisdom, power, and courage. These attributes are embodied by three main characters in the game series. I found a picture online of the Triforce with each of the three characters on it. I embedded this image into a page of my iBook.
When the reader clicks on any one of the labels, the view is zoomed in on that character and a brief description is displayed.
The second element that best exemplifies interaction in my iBook is the franchise timeline chapter. This chapter spanned six pages and contained each of the eighteen Legend of Zelda games released in chronological order. Each page showed the box of each game with a green jewel (a rupee from the games) above it. When the viewer taps or clicks on the rupee, a window opens with a picture from the game and a summary of the game’s significance in the series. This was my favorite feature of my iBook and I am really happy with how it turned out.
This project challenged me to try and push my publication to be more interactive and forced me to come up with creative ways to do that. I did struggle with learning two new software programs simultaneously. It was rewarding to use InDesign because I had no instruction from any of my classes on how to use that program and it allowed me to get a head start with it. As a result I am now very comfortable using InDesign a year later. I have used it extensively in later classes and I think that the exposure I had from this project enabled me to struggle with it less than my peers have at the same point in our education.
Creating immersive experiences is a crucial aspect to delivering enriching experiences for the people who use the digital products we create. This project gave me my first chance to start thinking about whether my digital products are immersive or not.
Russell Andlauer is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to the Interactive iBook in the DGM-2260 course and is representative of the skills learned.
