On a non-web-based multimodal interactive documentary production

The most common rendering of interactive documentary film is through the web-based medium, which is not “tangible” or as immersive as a different form could be. The earlier making of the “I Still Remember” documentary's memory floating bubbles interactive with audience's participation using ordinary OpenGL was the first non-web-based prototype. We describe a new HCI process and the design of an associated programmer framework for making a passive documentary interactive using currently available tools and preserving the aesthetic and emotional appeal. It is done in a local space as an artistic installation. In this context, we briefly review the proof-of-concept design and implementation of a multimodal interactive system, the Illimitable Space System (ISS). It was designed to supplement digital artists' work for various interactive scenarios and applications. Its design supports non-web-based interactive documentary creation with speech and gesture based interaction (via Kinect), music visualization and green screening for interactive dance visualization, among other things in real-time. The ISS framework provides a unified generalized architecture that supports a configurable setup of installations, as in public places described in earlier work. We also compare advantages and disadvantages of the ISS's based XNA/C# realization to that of the earlier OpenGL prototype for interactive documentary production.

I. Introduction

In this work we look into what it means to interact with a documentary in a non-web based platform and how new interactive media and computer graphics techniques help with interactive documentary production. Interactive documentary is a hybrid between participation and viewing, giving the audience different experience each time due to the non-linear nature of the genre. As a result, such a “film” can be integrated with various artistic installations (e.g., CitySpeak [1]) or even games (e.g., Fort McMoney or Reali Unreal [2]).