The brilliant designers at Google’s Create Lab have come up with a new way to show off virtual media or film, by using a gadget they’ve named “The Cube.” Their gadget allows writers and directors to tell a six-sided story, by projecting online media onto six sides of the virtual cube at the same time.
Google Create Lab unveiled their invention last week, during the Semi-Permanent event in sunny Sydney, Australia, where testers controlled a huge onscreen cube. The users “flipped” the cube in order to show sense from a specially created short film, designed specifically to show off the new format of interactive six-sided storytelling.
When the Cube hits commercial shelves, viewers will control it with a smaller, handheld cork cube, rotating the larger virtual model in order to show different scenes as they happen concurrently. Audio is tied to motion, so viewers will only hear sound for whichever side of the Cube is currently being seen.
The Cube’s technology is designed particularly for online use, to be viewed through a smartphone or other types of virtual media. According to Discovery, Google plans to release the Cube’s tech in a “sandbox app” for creators sometime in the coming months.
Using this new interactive medium, writers and directors could construct stories that have six parallel narratives, all them unfolding simultaneously. It would certainly take some getting used to for both writer and viewer, but the concept is certainly intriguing.
Source Discovery