Hot Norman
by Janet Murray & Freedom Baird
with Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests
and IBM's HotVideo

Hot Norman is a demo developed in January 1998 at MIT's Program in Advanced Interactive Narrative Technology. The project was directed by Professor Janet Murray, and implemented by Freedom Baird, who co-designed it with Prof. Murray.

The purpose of the project was to show how a new form of interactive storytelling could be implemented with a newly available video hyperlinking tool.

The tool used, HotVideo, was created at IBM's China Research Lab and T.J. Watson Research Center, under the direction of Dr. Jeane Chen, Program Director of Interactive Media in IBM's Internet Media Group.

HotVideo's "Maker" application allows a user to overlay animated, translucent geometric shapes onto a video clip, highlighting a character, object, or any part of a scene. When a HotVideo clip is played back with the "Player" application, these clickable shapes serve as links to any other piece of media--another video clip, a URL, text, an image, etc. A HotVideo Player plug-in installed in a web browser allows embedded HotVideo clips to be played within a web page.

Hot Norman's content is excerpted from a trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests, written by Alan Ayckbourn in 1973. The plays, produced for a small vacation-community theater, depict three views of a single story--a British bedroom farce--centered around Norman, a mischievous librarian, who doggedly tries to seduce all the women characters during the course of a weekend.. The story unfolds in three adjacent rooms of a big country house--with each of the three plays depicting the action in only one of the rooms. The plays' six characters run from room to room in the house, in such a way that, if you only watch one of the plays, you only get part of the story. It was Ayckbourn's intention that the plays be enjoyed, in this serial manner, by returning weekend vacationers.

The format of this densely woven drama, with action occuring in one room, then disappearing into the next, and with lies and deceit that need to be unknotted before we get the whole picture, lends itself beautifully to representation in the medium of hyperlinked video. Fortunately for us, the plays were produced on video by the BBC, so we were able to use them in our demo.

We designed the story interface to take advantage of the movement of action among adjacent rooms, and of the characters' many reminiscenses and speculations. The interface, shown in the image above, is an HTML page that can be browsed in Internet Explorer which supports iframes (floating frames whose size and location within the browser window can be specified). The background image reflects the setting of the play--a country house--in which three contiguous spaces are visible: the garden, the dining room, and the living room. Three frames are superimposed onto this image, into each of which a HotVideo Player is embedded in an iframe. When a hot link appears and is moused over by the user, a short caption appears in the Player's text field, describing the nature of the link. If the user decides to click the link, a new video clip will load, either in an adjacent frame, or in the same frame, depending on the type of link it is.

Using HotVideo's palette of colored overlays, we developed a "links language" specifically for the content of the Norman plays. Here's a glossary of our links types, some of which are shown in the image above.

Hot Norman has been shown thus far at several conferences and meetings including TED8, CHI '98, and IMPact '99.

For more information, please contact us: Janet Murray, Freedom Baird.