MONKEYmedia Releases Walk-in Theater for iPad

Walk-in Theater for iPad (Photo: Business Wire)

AUSTIN, Texas--()--Today, MONKEYmedia® celebrates 18 years of independent R&D innovation with the release of Walk-in Theater™ for iPad®. This surprising interactive media experience is the brainchild of a trio of Apple Advanced Technology Group alumni – moviemaker Rachel Strickland, sound designer Jim McKee, and interaction designer Eric Gould Bear.

Walk-in Theater is an experiment with peripatetic perspective, engaging participants’ proprioceptors and spatial memory to orient themselves as they navigate among multiple video streams in a 3D sound field. Departing from one-way linear cinema played on a single rectangular screen, this multi-channel virtual environment pursues a cinematic paradigm that undoes habitual ways of framing things, employing architectural concepts in a polylinear video/sound construction to create a kind of experience that lets the world reveal itself and permits discovery on the part of visitors. The free mobile app is available on the App Store.

“This work is stunning,” observes interactive media visionary Brenda Laurel, author of the now classic Computers as Theater. “It’s a kind of videography I could not have imagined, and its effectiveness in representing space and place is transformative.”

Inspiration and concept design for Walk-in Theater spring from Rachel Strickland’s Emptiness Can Hold Things. Improvising on techniques of polylinear perspective long explored in Japanese painting and landscape design, this seven-year work-in-progress establishes a new vocabulary for the cinematic construction of a sense of place. Strickland and McKee worked with Bear to develop a portable presentation strategy for letting people preview this spatially distributed video environment in a 3D simulation with localized audio, as well as a rapid prototyping tool for configuring video planes and sound sources to fit different exhibit spaces. Walk-in Theater introduces Cycle By – the first of six Kyoto location studies in Strickland’s interactive video composition.

Walk-in Theater’s patent-pending interaction techniques are not limited to entertainment. A technology incubation white paper can be downloaded from walk-in-theater.com. Stay tuned for future productions.

About MONKEYmedia, Inc.

Austin-based MONKEYmedia is a privately held user interface design studio, founded in 1994. Its portfolio of patented inventions includes claims directed towards telescopic advertising and other enhanced viewing experiences. Technology licenses are available through the SeamlessTV® Partner Program.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50387373&lang=en

Contacts

MONKEYmedia, Inc.
Elizabeth Crinejo, 512-650-1080 x183
elizabeth@monkey.com

Release Summary

MONKEYmedia celebrates 18 years of independent R&D innovation with the release of Walk-in Theater for iPad. This surprising interactive media experience is the brainchild of a trio of Apple alumni.

Contacts

MONKEYmedia, Inc.
Elizabeth Crinejo, 512-650-1080 x183
elizabeth@monkey.com