Well, if we can’t do an AR experience AND a drone race in a public place AND live GPS tracking AND get thousands of people to engage with a 15-point uni project, what CAN we do?
I met with @archolabs and @iamyoureye this morning to discuss our transmedia fable, and how ridiculously unviable it is. We came up with a few more doable ideas, some ways we could keep most of our idea but produce small parts of it, and also discussed the backstory of our metaphorical tortoise and hare.
I listed every single technology/medium we planned to use and assessed our ability to actually use it. I figured it was more or less like this:
Social media/real life advertisements building up to the race: still totally doable.
Street performance with the tech CEOs launching their drones: doable, but would be kinda dumb without actual drones.
Actual drone race: we’ll see. We need two drones and permission from the council to do that.
Live GPS tracking and video from the drones: slightly less doable than the drones, seeing as we’d need to actually get the drones first, but still po-o-ossibly doable.
Pre-filmed drone footage: Slightly more doable than an actual drone race.
Watching fake drones through AR: yeah, nah.
Fake GPS tracking: still doable, provided it’s a live-streamed video and not on, like, Google Maps or something.
Live social media race updates: 100% doable.
Continued user engagement and exquisite-corpse continuation: we’ll see… that may have to be the point where we leave the project to its own devices and come back when we take Transmedia Narratives 2. What do you mean that’s not a real paper shut up man
So yeah. Most of it’s still doable, just not the main bits. We can definitely fake GPS-tracking of the race and social media updates, but that might be the closest to an actual race we can do.
Other than that, we elaborated on our tech companies’ backstories.
The basic idea is that their CEOs used to know each other and were on good terms with one another. When they competed for startup funding, one of them (the Hare) stabbed the other one (the Tortoise) in the back (not literally), ruining their relationship and starting a rivalry between their firms. They’re having a competition to see which company can engineer the fastest drone.
I basically envision the H-AR CEO as the most obnoxious Silicon Valley stereotype possible: he’s arrogant, tries every new productivity trend that comes along (microdosing, anyone?), thinks his company is disrupting enormous industries all at once despite the fact they’re barely profitable, etc. Then I envision the Tort-OS CEO to be a whole lot more down-to-Earth, running their company out of their garage, hiring a tiny amount of people to produce something truly valuable to society, slowly but surely.
I’ve sorta defaulted into the position of the lead writer on this project – I’ve no idea whether that would be best or not, but hey. I’ll work on it gradually over the following week and get something back to the group by our next meeting on the 14th.











