A picture telling a thousands words
This post is about technical stuff. But about one that will blow your head off. It is about an innovation in storytelling that might be a game changer. Ironically, it is about a technique that we thought was dying, and we are forgetting about. It is about paper.
Actually, it is about photos and images printed on paper. We all still love scrolling (in the analogue meaning of that word!) through the pages of a book, watching beautiful printed images, and reading some text. The story unfolds before your eyes. Have there ever been better ways to tell stories? Ask your kid.
Well, we thought screens were taking over. Swiping was replacing flipping pages. Images were becoming audiovisuals, video. Where do we need print and pictures for?
Think again. Introducing the perfect blend between the printed book and the audiovisual screen. With the touch of paper, the heaviness of a book, the overwhelming tranquility of pictures and the spell of sounds and human voices. That tell the story when you flip the pages. This book, developped by Polish researchers from the University of Chemnitz for World Press Photo, features paper pages that speak when you watch. Every page is also a loudspeaker. The speaker technology is printed together with functional cicuitry in special flexible substrates on every page. Sensors in the page notice when the reader flips a page, and the next part of the story is being told.
World Press Photo uses the technology in its 2015 yearbook presenting the yearly contest winning press photo's from all over the world. A picture tells a thousand words, a wisdom we know for ages already. Now you can hear that words literally. Will it be the revival of the printed book, the printed magazine and newspaper? We can predict innovations that are even more impressive: where the picture on the page not only speaks, but starts moving as well, the printed video page. We are not that far away from that.
Watch this video on the soundbook and fall under its spell.