Google announced on Tuesday that its bringing its Spotlight Stories to YouTube with “Special Delivery,” a short film by Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations. The short movie will be viewable on several Android devices in what Google believes, is the newest way of story-telling.
Watching the movie might seem fairly normal to you, but once you get it up and running, you’ll realize otherwise. Special Delivery (in general, the new tech) allows you to follow the action at your own pace, from whatever angle you please. It is the latest of a number of similar Spotlight stories coming out from Google ATAP (the Advanced Technology and Projects group).
We’ve seen a lot of different virtual reality technologies being launched by Google/YouTube this year. From plain 360-degree video to immersive content using the Google Cardboard, we saw many innovative VR techs. Spotlight Stories are, in a way, an extension of all the 360-degree tech YouTube had to offer. The difference being that these new short movies take advantage of your phone’s sensors, turning your phone into a window to a story taking place all around you.
You could just move your smartphone around and view different subplots taking place within the main story.
Here’s how many surprises you can expect from Special Delivery, according to the blog post announcing it:
[…] In the full interactive experience, you’ll encounter 10 subplots, three potential ways to view the ending, and 60+ moments where you can decide to follow the story in different ways. Each viewing is unique. We don’t want to spoil the ending, so that’s all we’ll say for now…
While you can surely go directly to the interactive version of the movie, if you want to watch the movie the way the creators intended it to be watched, you could just go to the plain version which is also available on the Spotlight Stories YouTube channel, and you can also watch with Google Cardboard.
Spotlight stories, Google says, will reach out to more Android devices by next year and also gain support for iOS.
