Spotlight Stories are brief, interactive entertainments — “immersive shorts” is the preferred term—originally conceived by the Advanced Technology and Projects team at Motorola, during the company’s brief life as a Google subsidiary. The ATAP unit did not go to Lenovo when the Chinese PC maker bought Motorola last year, but was shifted to Google’s Android, Chrome and Apps division. ATAP has many projects in the works including a 3-D sensing system called Tango and a modular phone development kit called Ara.

But Spotlight Stories reach beyond the geeky advances into something that uses advanced tech to reframe storytelling itself. They are the embodiment of the vision that Steve Jobs always espoused about the nexus of art and technology.

Those few who have been exposed to them know that Spotlight Stories can take your breath away. (Only in part because you have to expend physical energy jerking the phone around to see everything.) They are also costly and have no obvious business model. Yet their promise is such that Sundar Pichai, who heads Android (as well as all Google products as of last’s month’s reorg), has blessed the project’s continued development. “The ATAP team has developed a new art form created specifically for mobile,” Pichai said in a statement to Backchannel. “We’re excited to see how the technology behind Spotlight Stories will be used by artists to bring stories and characters to life for people to enjoy.”

SpiderCam hanging from a bridge.

After three animation-based efforts—the most recent, a heart-tugging vignette called Duet, will be released “very soon”—ATAP is doubling down by expanding to live action and hiring a director from the top of the A list. But the plot will really thicken later on, when Google opens up production to outsiders. A cliffhanger awaits: will a new generation of interactive filmmakers begin churning out immersive shorts for Android phones? Or will ATAP’s advances be remembered as a test lab for the coming era of virtual reality?

Spotlight Stories came to life as a serendipitous offspring of the Google-Motorola marriage, which had the lifespan of a Kardashian nuptial. When Google paid its $12.5 billion dowry in 2012, Larry Page saw his new gem as more than just a high headcount afterthought accompanying the patent portfolio that motivated the purchase. He envisioned Motorola as a hotbed of invention that would supercharge the entire Android platform. The tip of the innovation spear would be the ATAP group, set up as a mobile-oriented cousin to Google X. To lead it, Google tapped a high-profile hire, Regina Dugan. She had been a surprisingly public (TED talks!) head of the traditionally circumspect government agency DARPA. Yes, the same DARPA that gave birth to the Internet, as well as everything from lasers to the artificial intelligence behind Siri. Dugan set up ATAP to conform to the DARPA system, which employs researchers for two-year periods and encourages them, in turn, to hire contractors to help develop their projects. That way a relatively small team has huge reach, and everyone strives to work quickly for maximum impact.

Spotlight Stories was born soon after the acquisition. It began with a question and an impulse. The question came when ATAP engineers, particularly one from a company Google had bought called Human Engines, wondered what could be done with the 60 percent of the time a phone’s high-powered graphics chips were idle. The impulse, coming from Dugan, was to capitalize on the personal nature of a device that people wanted within reach 24 hours a day. “Do something emotional,” she told a team headed by Human Engines co-founder Baback Elmieh. The mission of Project Avatar, as it was known then, was to use the specific technology of the chip-and-sensor packed Moto X in development to generate interactive graphics that would somehow tap the human side of its users.

The missing piece was storytellers. “We tried painting on this new canvas, and we pretty much sucked at it,” Dugan explains. “So we had to call in the professionals.”

ATAP snared a prize immediately: a Pixar director. Jan Pinkava had directed Ratatouille and had a robotics doctorate to boot. “We were able to sit in a room and brainstorm,” Pinkava told me last year, “and came up with the idea of giving the audience a camera, to make the technology work so a story would unfold before your eyes.” Pinkava brought in an all-star crew including former Pixar animator Doug Sweetland and Caldicott-winning illustrator Jon Klassen . Everything had to be reinvented, even the way a movie is scored — the breathless Django-esque melody evoking Parisian bistros was flexible enough to punctuate the pratfalls but also to vamp for a while if the viewer decided to turn away from Pepe the mouse and study treetops instead. The creation process was joyful: “Going into that room where Jan was, was like being at Pixar in the early days,” says Rob Cook — who was one of Pixar’s founders, now consulting on Spotlight Stories. “Just kind of buzz to it, and it made me happy to be around.”

Over the next few months the team created Windy Day, a raucous interactive delight starring a hapless mouse named Pepe who kept losing his red sombrero. On October 30, 2013, Moto X users were alerted to the debut by a hat icon mysteriously appearing on the screen. If they clicked on it, their phone instantly became a window into Pepe’s world.

Screenshots from Windy Day.

Windy Day was a total hoot, a laugh-out-loud CG (computer-generated) cartoon that rewarded multiple viewings. But it did not foment anywhere near the splash that its technology or its artistry deserved. (Had it been released by Apple, there would have been ticker-tape parades from Cupertino to Burbank.) The problem was that so few people got to see it — the justification for the investment (a unique feature of the Moto phone) had severely dampened its profile, because sales of the Moto X were disappointing. When the second Spotlight Story, a thematically similar short called Buggy Night, appeared last March, it was equally innovative but lacking the novelty of the first effort, got even less attention.

So when Google sold off Motorola last year and took in ATAP, it was fair to speculate whether Spotlight Stories would continue. Though Google says its run rate is relatively modest, it almost certainly racks up millions of dollars in engineering costs and the salaries of directors, animators and composers with considerable IMDB credits and, in some cases, golden statuettes. Dugan, however, claims that it was not a tough sell. “All through Google, Spotlight Stories are just beloved,” she says. “Spotlight is not about a piece of content — it’s about a new format that’s unique to mobile. And the only way you can develop that new format is to create in it.” So ATAP was able to complete its next project, which embodied ambition in a more artistic realm. Instead of plucking the funnybone, Google went for the heart. And the auteur was a celebrated master of something one wouldn’t associate with an envelope-pushing new technology: hand-drawn animation.