Description:

As part of the collaborative documentary Virtual Revolution , a 4×1hr series about  the history and consequences of the web, BBC2  has launched a “3D documentary explorer”. The idea is to allow an interactive viewing of the series content, and therefore to create a new way to browse the content creating a totally different experience than when watching the linear series.

As a viewer you can either watch the programmes on TV (or on iPlayer) OR go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/3dexplorer_start.shtml and view most of the series online but in a 3D environment where one can jump off at any time from the video content and  browse related websites. Effectively what BBC has designed is a clever visualization tool that simplifies navigation in and out of the video stream and allows you to jump in between segments of the video itself. A glorified DVD navigation with the added bonus of web links.

Find out more:

Try yourself the 3D explorer

Look at the linear documentary Virtual Revolution (or at least to some documentation about it)

My comments:

Is this an interactive documentary or a clever visualisation tool?

I have to admit that I was quite sceptical when I tried it out. The film starts with the opening shots of the first episode, but one can at any time skip to another part of the documentary or jump to websites linked to the content that one is watching. This means that one is constantly moving from video content to web content. At first I thought that the paste of the video was too different from the paste of the web browsing. When you start watching the episode you do not feel like browsing out of it. TV editing is made to keep you inside the story – and not to allow you breaks of freedom out of its narrative.  But after a while I liked the idea of having a topologiacal view of the whole content of the series.

In a way the 3D explorer is any TV producer’s dream: a way to show you all the research that has been made while doing the documentary itself and still keeping you tuned to the author’s linear documentary. Is the explorer also responding to the viewer’s dream? I do not know… probably not mine… What I am searching in new media is a way to show some of the layers that compose any reality. I like the idea of representing the multiple. Here the 3D explorer adds layers of information to the video stream… is this enough? Are we not back to what used to be called ‘enhanced interactive TV’ – where interaction was only used to give extra information, but not alternative narratives, or depth of dimensions?

Well… I suppose it is a first step. But we stay in the informational layer of “associated data”. Nothing is shown about the users that have collaborated to the documentary via the crowd sourcing process that the BBC has experimented with. Nothing is said about the multiple other ways in which the history of the web could have been depicted. There are no doubts, no other possibilities, no other paths… just some clinical extra information to support the argument of the film.

Behind a sexy visualisation tool that gives a 3D effect to the story a strangely flat view of reality emerges: a reality that is supported by objective data, a reality that gives more of the same and does not consider “the rest”, or the “possible other”. Maybe the documentary explorer is not that 3D after all… which is a shame, because something was there… somethig could have emerged…

BBC is currently broadcasting its series about the history and consequences of the web. The original title “Digital Revolution” – which was opened to crowd sourcing – has finally become “Virtual Revolution” (the crowds were not very inspired, after all). It is currently downloadable on  BBC iPlayer – or broadcast  on Saturdays on BBC2. For those who have been following this blog, you might recall that BBC has called it an “open source documentary”… and this has been the source of several blog entries since I personally think that it is not open sourced at all – although it allowed some input from the viewers during the production phase.

But the reason of today’s entry is that – honouring what they had announced 6 months ago-  BBC has launched a “3D documentary explorer” to allow an interactive viewing of the series content. This effectively means that you can either watch the programmes on TV (or on iPlayer) OR go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/3dexplorer_start.shtml and view it online in a 3D environment that allows you to jump off at any time from the video content and  browse related websites. Effectively what BBC has designed is a clever visualization tool that simplifies navigation in and out of the video stream and allows you to jump in between segments of the video itself. A glorified DVD navigation with the added bonus of web links.

But what sort of experience does this browsing create?

I have to admit that I was quite sceptical when I tried it out. At first I thought that the paste of the video was too different from the paste of the web browsing. When you start watching the episode you do not feel like browsing out of it. TV editing is made to keep you inside the story – and not to allow you breaks of freedom out of its narrative.  But after a while I liked the idea of having a topologiacl view of the whole content of the series.

In a way the 3D explorer is any TV producer’s dream: a way to show you all the research that has been made while doing the documentary itself and still keeping you tuned to the author’s linear documentary. Is the explorer also responding to the viewer’s dream? I do not know… probably not mine… What I am searching in new media is a way to show some of the layers that compose any reality. I like the idea of representing the multiple. Here the 3D explorer adds layers of information to the video stream… is this enough?

Well… I suppose it is a first step. But we stay in the informational layer of “associated data”. Nothing is shown about the users that have collaborated to the documentary via the crowd sourcing process that the BBC has experimented with. Nothing is said about the multiple other ways in which the history of the web could have been depicted. There are no doubts, no other possibilities, no other paths… just some clinical extra information to support the argument of the film.

Behind a sexy visualisation tool that gives a 3D effect to the story a strangely flat view of reality emerges: a reality that is supported by objective data, a reality that gives more of the same and does not consider “the rest”, or the “possible other”. Maybe the documentary explorer is not that 3D after all… which is a shame, because something was there… somethig could have emerged…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/3dexplorer.shtml

Description:

Jonathan Harris is well known for his data visualization projects (We Feel Fine and Time Capsule, 2006).

In May 2007 he decided to document his trip to Barrow (Alaska) – where he went to assist to a whale hunt done by the Inupiat Eskimos – by taking 3,214 photographs in seven days.

The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.

This is how Jonathan Harris explains the purpose of his project:

First, to experiment with a new interface for human storytelling. The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub-stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.). Each viewer will experience the whale hunt narrative differently, and not necessarily in a linear fashion, constructing his or her own understanding of the experience.

(ref: http://www.number27.org/#whalehunt).

The result is an incredible mosaic of photos that can be browsed by colour, by time, by intensity or by  keyword, in a very ludic way.

Find out more:

See the project and play with this amazing photographic interface at http://thewhalehunt.org/whalehunt.html

See Jonathan Harris’ other projects on his own website http://www.number27.org/index.html

My comments:

I find this photographic project particularly elegant and sleeck looking. The photographic mosaic is really fun to navigate, and when one gets into specific photos the default patten is that photos keep coming as ina slide show in a somehow hypnotic mode.

Jonathan says that with the whale hunt he has created experimental interface for storytelling. I certainly thing that he is stretching narrative visualisation but I wonder what sort of storytelling this is. The narrative, although photographic, is clearly linear (cronological) while our entry point can be multiple.

I had fun, and something is fascinating in this project, but what is the documentation really gaining with this type of interface? Is it just clever or it is showing something more about reality?