Interactive Narratives

When I went to Bornmagazine.org's website, my first impression was that the homepage looked like a receipt you would get in a grocery store. But that's not a bad thing, it means the layout is simple, clean and easy to comprehend.

I took a look at "Shirtless Others" by Jason Ockert and Matthias Dittrich. It's an interactive flash animation that tells a story. In order to advance the text to continue reading, you have to pull a butcher knife through a shark. While it's a very interesting idea and a good concept, it's poorly executed. The flash animation is fairly advanced because the animator tried to make it look 3D using some complex methods. This makes the animation look choppy on some computers. Having to continually click and hold the left mouse button to continue reading is annoying especially if the animation is running slowly.

I then took a look at the Super Bowl Multimedia website. The webpage opens with an amazing panoramic picture of Super Bowl XLV and has an interesting pre-loader that tells you its progress by adding color to the picture. How close the picture is to being loaded is represented by how much color is in the picture. The user is then allowed to view the entire picture by scrolling around. The user can either click on one of the arrows that point in the desired direction, or click and drag on the screen. There is even an option to view the panoramic picture in full screen so the user can view all of the the detail.

Below the panoramic is a menu with links to panoramic pictures taken at Super Bowls of years past. This is a very good website that's well laid out. I can tell that there was a lot of thought and effort put into making this website. The design is very crisp and easy to navigate. It provides plenty of interactivity through flash.