“ A new book browsing experience for the iPad ”
For the elective course Experimental Formgiving and Visualization we, a team of four, have created the application Storyworld. The assignment of this course was to give non-material literary books an identity and create an environment for displaying and browsing large collections of books, by digital media. Our goal was to make use of the new possibilities that digital media offers, and not try to simulated the traditional way of browsing for books.
We choose to use characters to represent the stories' identity. By going into this direction we were able to explore the possibilities of digital media by providing information in a more visual way and to enrich the browsing experience. We experimented with setting variables and requirements to create the right amount of freedom for the author or publisher to express the identity of the story. Below you find a demo video of the App concept.
The Storyworld application consists out of a "world" with stories you are reading, want to read or have read. When clicking on a story, the character will come to live and you will receive more information about it. In the browse world, all the stories are randomly scattered around. It provides you with several options for searching and browsing. When clicking on a character more layers of information will be revealed. There is also a function that shows the family and friends of the character. With friends we refer to other stories of the same other and friends stands for comparable stories (recommendations).