James Patrick Gordon

Zooburst

March 10, 2010

While I was going through one last round of my Google Reader feeds before bed, I came across a link for Zooburst. According to their site, it’s a tool for digital storytelling design, allowing users to create digital 3D pop-up books. Judging by the video, it looks like it outputs to one of two interfaces- something akin to a Rich Internet Application (Flash? Silverlight?), and an augmented reality interface that projects the book onto a surface in the view of a camera. The public beta opens next month, and the site promises more features in future releases, such as:

…a number of enhanced features, including the ability to customize objects using an integrated drawing tool, flying objects and sound and speech integration. In addition, Zooburst books will live within a larger social networking framework, allowing you to easily maintain your own collection of books that can be shared, discussed and embedded on your website or blog.

Needless to say, I’m pretty psyched about this. The promise of a user-friendly tool for designers and storytellers of all ages to create and share compelling interactive narratives is very, very exciting.

The only thing I bristled at was the apparent lack of support for importing media files. When the beta goes live, the tool will offer a library of Creative Commons-licensed vector art as available art assets. A future release will offer an integrated drawing tool. And, apparently, that’s it. Personally, I would much rather create art assets in Photoshop, export to PNG’s, and bring them into Zooburst. But I can table these concerns (for the moment), for two reasons. First, I accept that I may very well not fit into their target demographics. And second, it’s entirely possible that the integrated drawing tool will be just fine for what I would want to do.

I sent an email asking to be included in the public beta. If I’m let in, I’ll try it out and report back!

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