Reading Time: 4 minutes BBC Research and Development is the home of technological research and broadcast innovation at the BBC – behind innovations from Ceefax right up to modern day standards like UHD. One of the ways we continue to innovate is by experimenting with and exploring storytelling formats; from the thousand outcomes of branching narratives to exploring other… Read more »
Article Archive: Projects
Designing an interactive audio narrative for children
Inga Breede
Reading Time: 11 minutes “Alexa, open The Messlins” says one of my kids out loud to the smart speaker setup in our living room. After eight months of research, design and production, I was about to witness my children interacting with my voice-enabled audio story for the very first time. With a background in performance and media production, I… Read more »
Adaptive Podcasting & Rabbit Holes Collective: Interview with Ian Forrester
Weronika Dwornik
Reading Time: 9 minutes We talk to Ian Forrester, a Senior Firestarter at BBC R&D, who has been developing innovative adaptive podcasting technology and working on its potential applications alongside artists and creative professionals from the Rabbit Holes Collective. Through their work, the collective aims to ‘constructively disrupt’ and reimagine possibilities for digital collaboration by developing ideas in immersive… Read more »
Enhanced audio stories for city wanderers
Agnieszka Przybyszewska, Anna Nowak, Karolina Misiarek, Remigiusz Jóźwiak, Szymon Szul
Reading Time: 8 minutes Falling into the Story(World) Don’t you love that moment when you fall into a storyworld? The magic of storytelling relies on the power of words to create the world you visit through the act of reading or listening. Suspending your real world situation, time and space, and even your body, you transport yourself into another,… Read more »
Creating immersive audio stories for people with Parkinson’s disease
Hanna Slättne
Reading Time: 7 minutes I have worked as a dramaturg and theatre maker for over 20 years, spending my life thinking about how to create stories for audiences to lose themselves in. My professional toolbox is full of ways to develop the dramaturgy of an experience. Yet, in my new research project, I have had to put most of… Read more »
Words: Foundation Bricks in a Media Warehouse
Michael Whelan
Reading Time: 4 minutes The creation, presentation and publication of new creative work has been a core element of undergraduate teaching programs at Queensland University of Technology for over four decades now. What started as the writing and performance of works for the stage by drama and dance students, has been transformed via a tsunami of consumer-led technologies and… Read more »
The Challenge of Reading Ex Libris
Simon Groth
Reading Time: 5 minutes In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly: This is an introduction to a novel you will never read. He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he… Read more »
Beyond the Book: The Middle
Paper Nations
Reading Time: 7 minutes Paper Nations, a South West England-based creative writing incubator dedicated to diversity and innovation, has commissioned three writers with links to the region to develop exciting and experimental writing projects that use smartphone technologies to tell immersive stories. Paper Nations is led by Bambo Soyinka, Professor of Story at Bath Spa University. The “Beyond the… Read more »
Screenshots: The Library of Last Resort
Simon Groth
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. The Library of Last Resort by Matt Finch The Library of Last Resort is a ruse. You’d be forgiven at first for thinking this is a standard text-based branching-narrative game, a multiple-choice point-and-click that harks back to thousands… Read more »
Hands Up for Digital Humanities – When Humanists Go Off-Piste
Lauren Hayhurst
Reading Time: 7 minutes Welcome to the fourth article in this series where we’re dissecting the multifarious entity of Digital Humanities (DH). To understand the context and scope of this series, and to consider the research questions upon which the investigation is based, please view the previous articles here, here and here. We’ll also be referring to my online survey Hands Up for… Read more »