IDNA, from apelab, is a new experiment in spatial storytelling. Image: apelab It's a tablet-based movie that makes you the viewer and the director. Image: apelab By moving the tablet around as the animation unfolds, you can explore the narrative world however you like. Image: apelab In essence, you decide what parts of the story to follow. Image: apelab The tablet becomes a window into an immersive, 360-degree world. Image: apelab But it's more than just looking: Where you focus your attention determines which branch of the narrative you'll follow. Image: apelab Stereo sound cues draw viewers to important action in each scene. Image: apelab Image: apelab

What's harder than democratizing the arts, though, is using these tools to push them into new territory entirely, and that's exactly what makes a new spatial storytelling concept from the Swiss studio apelab so intriguing. By letting users explore animated scenes in 360 degrees, it creates a new type of experience–one where the person holding the tablet is both viewer and director.

>The person holding the tablet is both viewer and director.

Emilie Tappolet and Sylvain Joly, the designers behind the project, say the idea was born from a familiar childhood fantasy. "As movie addicts, we were always dreaming of seeing beyond the limits of the screen," Tappolet says. Their app, currently in prototype, redefines both the familiar formulation of a "movie" and what it means to watch one.

The story, IDNA, brings the viewer to a near future where genetic code is used as a means of control by a sinister, shadowy government. But instead of serving as screen on which the story plays out, here your tablet instead acts as a window into this world. The narrative world surrounds you in 360 degrees–it's up to you to decide where to look. In that way it's a bit like today's immersive video games, but the key difference here is that there's nothing for the viewer to control. "The spectator here is a witness," Tappolet explains. "He is not a character or an avatar."

This sort of open-ended spatial narrative required solving some tricky problems. You don't want your viewer gazing up at the sky while all the action's happening down at eye-level. For their own foray into spatial storytelling, the folks at Motorola's moonshot division had a simple fix: The story doesn't move forward until you refocus your attention on the main event.

At apelab, they're trying some other things. One is sound. By taking care to spread sound effects and dialogue throughout the stereo field, headphone-donning viewers can distinguish between a scuffle up in front of them, say, and a person creeping up behind them. Then they can choose which they'd rather watch.

But that choice is important. Tappolet and Joly plotted the film so that the story plays out different depending on where you look, taking you down one path of a branching series of narratives. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure without ever being explicit about the fact that you are, in fact, making a choice. "There are no pauses," Tappolet says. "No physical interface to make the choices. You watch the movie depending on your own affect and sensibility, following the characters or elements you are drawn towards."

>It's up to you to decide where to look.

Only at the end do you realize you've really just seen a fraction of the story–the most curious can start from the top, following different characters and watching the action unfold from different perspectives. "You can explore this story world for a long time," Tappolet explains. "Some subtle elements in the scenes can lead you to places you’d never thought of."

In its current unfinished form, the animation runs six minutes–holding an iPad up to your face for much longer gets exhausting, the developers found. Plus, in their early demos, they've discovered that their novel story had a somewhat surprising effect on viewers: People couldn't help themselves from running around while they were watching it.

As they plan their crowdfunding campaign to put the finishing touches on IDNA, Tappolet and Joly's active audiences gave them an idea for their next project: a variation on the theme where the animated world actually forces you to walk around in your real one. Say, at some point during the story, you'd see a door floating up on some unreachable plane. As the designers imagine it, you'd have to find an elevator, a staircase or some other thing to climb on in real life to move the story forward. The idea is that, instead of moving you through a world and giving you freedom to view it in 360 degrees, they'll give you the freedom to explore 50 meters of narrative world, all through the porthole of your iPad. Assuming, that is, you can find a staircase.