Put your hands up in the air! And wave them like you just don’t care! It’s something you’d expect to do at a rock concert, but at a movie? If Audience Entertainment has its way, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The company’s goal is to get people out of their seats and start interacting with the screen.
Seen as a pre-movie advertisement tool, the company wants to build simple games and activities that audiences will participate in collectively. By moving one way or another, the audience will control what happens on the screen.
TechCrunch reported that the system has already started to experiment in theaters as a part of a Disney Cruise Line ad campaign. By waving their arms right or left, audience members help guide Donald Duck down a slide located on one of the ships. CEO Barry Grieff believes that as a society, people are beginning to move away from linear story lines to ones that require interactivity.
He doesn’t want to stop at movie theaters however. Grieff wants to include motion and sound capturing cameras at any venue that large crowds gather. This could include sports arenas and concert venues and would make viewers feel like actual participants. He calls the new interactive format “iD” in comparison to 3D. It’s the next dimension.
In order to bring interactivity to a large scale however, Audience Entertainment needs the skills of developers, advertisers, and filmmakers to help create content. That’s why they’ve gone ahead and announced a software development kit that will allow third party vendors to help grow the movement. It’s an interesting concept to say the least. Though the controls will not be all that sensitive, it is something new. So stand up and wave, it might be coming to a theater near you.
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