An alternate reality newspaper (in which the White House has been rebuilt after 9//11) created to explore the T.V. show Fringe.

I have been thinking a lot about these two words lately. They both describe something that we are going for here at GLOPiLOT. But they also both describe a very wide range of results and so may not be specific enough to describe what we are trying to communicate.

For instance, is the Internet as a whole an interactive experience? If I go to a web site and can choose what pages I read and in what order, that seems to qualify as an interactive experience. And cool as that may be it is not the level of interactivity that I am talking about when I say we create interactive experiences. Our clients would feel pretty ripped off if it was!

What about immersion? We can argue that a novel is immersive; it takes you into another world that is co-created by the author and your imagination working together to create a compelling escape form the everyday. But that’s easy, right? I mean, creating great books is not easy at all, but the end result of picking up a great book and being swept away, that’s pretty simple. It is a very passive form of immersion.

So now consider a media collection such as the one surrounding the J. J. Abrams show Fringe. The show itself is an even more passive form of being swept away than a novel, but the video medium engages both site and sound. Plus, and here is where it gets really cool, they create web sites for faux companies and organizations from the show for you to visit and explore. They even created a whole newspaper from an alternate world that ties in with the story-line of the show. Sight, sound, touch and even smell (if one could but hold the newspaper). This is just a basic example of what some storytellers are doing with new and old media to deliver a narrative experience, but doing so in parts. This approach allows for a fan to wander upon the parts and explore them as they desire. Plus it creates multiple opportunities for fan-to-fan viral marketing activity. Now that’s immersive!

So have I come to any conclusions? Probably not. But hopefully I have clarified that there are new levels of interactive and new levels of immersion that are being created right now. We at GLOPiLOT may not be creating anything as vast as the Fringe or Lost Experience (yet!), but we are aware of the possibilities and excited to play with them.