The Future of Digital Comics: A Mixed Bag of Excitement and Uncertainty

Bringing presents is just another way of you know controlling the camera, or does VR actually bring something new to it? I think we can ask the same thing of this type of experience. Doesn't need AR because when we were told let's go check out comic books in augmented reality, my first thought was it was gonna be opening an actual comic book and having tracked pages and getting animation effects in the physical panels of a 22-page book that wasn't this at all. I could imagine if they very have this, the art assets animation maybe a blank book right let me hold something physical and then animate the panels on there that could be cool.

That sounds difficult, but you're talking about tracking the actual fold of the pages. I agree with you, if you haven't thought that through, it would be interesting. I'm answering like "book 4 all that's just blank and you can project whatever you want onto it" that would be neat, but also very very difficult. Yeah, I think at this point we're still in the experimentation phase right, like I think developers are taking the language and the grammar of the tool sets they know and formats that they know in this case media and comic books and literally throwing it on the wall. I really have mixed feelings about this because I guys who were running this company I think they're the real deal, they're not looking to make a cash-in on new technology they are comic book guys, that's like to the bone.

They believe that comics will evolve into something that's more electronic and they're probably right. I'm just not convinced that we've found it yet and I'm not sure what that is. It concerns me that it is gonna move to more towards movies do people want to be that passive when they digest their comics? I'm not so sure, no. I think when I read a comic book the things I like are the physical nature, yeah the things I like are the page turning you know it's it's it's a two-way communication because I'm adding a lot of my imagination to it as well and so I don't necessarily need a comic book to be fully animated. Yeah I can go to the movies for that right.

So I don't know where that middle ground is, and I'm not exactly sure this is it but I'm glad they're trying experimenting with it. And as a piece of technology it is interesting to see art floating in space, to see negative space be used an interesting way with the black and the colors and the white as opposed to having solid outlines you're looking through. Hey, you know it's not exactly interactive with the room you're in but you are interacting with it in your room.

We should point that out that as a Magic Leap app it actually is the first one I've seen that doesn't take advantage of the room mapping so there's no sense of where the walls are if you obviously it doesn't project the images onto the wall. I would have liked at the very least when you're pushing the image away from yourself if it stopped at the wall like if that was a hard limit instead they do let you push through it. I'm sure that they could make it work that way and maybe that's the end goal but I was surprised that we saw a magical about that didn't take advantage of their killer feature which is this ability to know where all of your gem trees in the real world.

Maybe maybe a way to use this might be the idea of putting art on your walls right so many times I look at beautiful art in comic books and I want to buy a print of it or I want to you know take the page out and put on my wall framing up because I love the art if you have a digital version of that it would be very easy for you have at least been a reality persistent piece of art in your real space. That would be pretty neat, and that's how I could see digital comics being interface with the real world.

The App Itself

I'm glad that they're doing it and I'll also be curious to see what other people do with their tool especially when it comes to enveloping the user in a 360 experience. Media in AR and even in VR for the still hasn't been solved yet, a lot of problem solving so that comes anyway.

That's it for this week we'll be back next week with more coverage in VR and AR thanks for watching and we'll see you next time bye you\\n

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody's norm from Testim it's jeremy from Testim welcome back to projections we're this week we are diving back into augmented reality it's the future mixed reality XR as that's what magically wants us to call it magically of course working with a bunch of developers game developers and some other app developers for experiences to experiment and dip their toes in of winning reality one of whom is made fired they released an app seven years ago in 2012 on the iPad this is one of the there's not too many of these but it's one of at least two comic book viewing applications that you can download now on your phone on your iPad or even in virtual reality that they launched in the gear VR last year and now they're moving into the augmented reality space so just this week made fire announced that their partnership with magic leap has come to fruition and they were releasing four magically an application that lets you experience their vision of comic books of motion comics in augmented reality it's really a kind of a trippy experience not like flipping open a comic book at all right it's more like the pages or the panels are floating in your space right now they'll take traditional comic book assets or if it's made for the app that even better than they have all the proper layers and they'll break the layers apart and it's very true dimensional it sort of like a viewmaster kind of experience right where you have one layer behind another but they can do interesting things with transitions where they move objects in and out add sound effects and they can now with as you said in on the magically if they can do positional audio so they can put audio around you and correspond to actual objects in the scene the app is available if you haven't magically to try out which I know most of you probably don't we went over to made fires offices in the Bay Area to test this app and also have a conversation with their CEO about just the concept what means to create comic books for augmented reality so check it out so a fire you guys have been around for a while you guys put comics in a digital format give me a little bit of history of where you come from and what made fire does I know you know your comics so yeah we're passionate about storytelling and we're a creates a platform we wanted to enable anyone to tell a story and make a character in a world and my interest is actually always being in if you like storyboarding and the way that the way that story is developed before it becomes you know film TV gaming and I've always adored comics and the way that they are in a relatively easy way to tell a story you know and build character so as a group of founders we wanted to make a place in a way for anyone to publish what we call a motion book which is really a moving words and pictures story and moving coming and we have been I think we're about six years into that journey and this announcement of imagine leap is very much kind of the culmination of all that work right so when you started was there a list of things that you as comic creators and comics fans kind of listed out and quantified as these are the parts of the comic experience that we've never want to change because you're basically doing an adaptation at that point yeah you know one of the partners you have Dave Gibbons famous yet Watchmen and that graphic novel famously it was very difficult to adapt and its creators were outspoken about the format as he reformed yeah the rules we set ourselves were we need to we need to create tools that are very easy to use because comics are you know pencil and paper they should be simple we shouldn't need to know any coding we shouldn't need to know 3d modeling and a lot of animation so the way the tool the made fire tool which is in a browser is very easy to use we also felt that reading is special because you get to control the pace and you're not you know at the mercy of someone else's speed you can sit with the art you can sit with the story you can go backwards and forwards so they were - there were two important rules for us and we didn't want to change the way people make stories already so we didn't want to Challenge anything to do with the dhobi stool set alright you know that would be crazy because that's how people work so we are once people have drawn and written the book with the place that they can build the book and publish the book so transitions effects scale sound so we think of that as building or animating a book in while comics as you guys have been publishing them don't have to exist on a page and maybe no we don't think of them in terms of 22 pages they were still panels are the handles you talk about storyboards those are panels and whatever format you're publishing on iPad VR yeah XR there are still windows that panels yeah into the content yeah their moment comments are exciting because they leave as we said a lot of room for the imagination we don't want to you know if you start animating everything and telling every aspect of the story you need to be Pixar or Disney you know you you're into big budgets big productions we wanted to give moments and let the imagination imagine some of the action and sound between but punctuate those so they're more brought to life than just the PDF because I think that the problem we we felt with digital is and a lot of people felt like oh digital's not as good as my print printed book because you don't you can't smell it you can't hold all your the tangible is is so strong so we really wanted to bring some qualities that are spread that is distinct to digital devices now as we get to magic leap you can actually walk through the story you can actually experience it as part of your world and it's it's a kind of mind-blowing how the grammar of storytelling evolves well let's talk about this experience and specifically when people think about augmented reality mixed reality one of the first things they imagine is something literally popping out of a page where is some connection to the real world but that's not exactly what you're doing here there is no you know tracked object Yorkers aren't popping on a page yeah it is still reading panels but now in your physical space yes we've thought about describing it as walking through a pop-up book it's almost like you know you can kind of see it suspended in space you can put it wherever you want in your room you can walk through it as you've seen you can and bring it nearer to you or further away you can scale it the size of a building or you can have it tiny in your hand it's kind of amazing to think about layers in space with sound emotion and how how much you can do with that well you talk about interactivity you're talking about people physically moving to the content is it was that a direct intent is that something you imagine people will be doing as you're reading this or is it more of a Leanback we actually think is we think is a lot of fun to be in certain scenes to go and see like a Batcave for Batman and actually be able to explore it but I think generally generally we wanted this to be a very an experience that comes to you so in their control with the glasses on you can pull the book nearer or further you can trigger through so the interaction is quite straightforward we feel like we want the storyteller to tell the story to the audience and not try and make loads of different choices mm-hmm we think that's part of the magic of storyboards and comics is that your handheld through a story so this so to answer that there's plenty of room to great Easter eggs on spaces for people to explore if that serves the story but generally we feel like it's quite nice to just sit with it and and feel like you're not in a rush and you're not having to fight anything and you can just hang out with this story time you're adapting existing comic books working with publishers to bring those into the made fire format but you're also doing original content with this in mind I imagine those workflows differ I mean the script look the same or their specific kind of annotated instructions or how to format it in this this format yeah we've created loads of how to's and jump in guides and videos that will sit on made fire and we found that at this point in 2019 probably half of the publishers are creating material in layers and and half are still pretty oriented I'm talking about print publishers for PDF but what we've seen is gaming companies like Blizzard studios like Fox Nickelodeon Disney they're all they're all in layers already so they're actually creating art and text in layers so they've found this tool very native very very logical in fact more logical than collapsing everything into a PDF so we want to keep things with depth and immersive the way writing the feedback we get from writers is our this is a real freedom because instead of having to you know start top left on a page and finish bottom right really just got the access of time and you can reset the scene all that so take a horror for example we can puncture at any moment of a horror because you're kind of resetting the stage rather than in printed sense you have to rely the page turn of a page yeah so every panel is a page turn this opportunity can be exactly or you could build up a scene of different panels so the grammar of storytelling and the way you build a scene so we're we're writing is sequence instead of page kind of thinking of things in sections sequences and moments rather than pages and panels is their opportunity to layout sequences your panels all around you so it's a real 360 yeah we love the weave so we make a whole series of originals with people like Dave Gibbons and Mike Carey and Bill sinkovitz you're coming both legends but also newcomers are using the tools and we see things every day that we didn't think of but our thesis has been keep it reading keep people so we don't voice the books we let people read we don't and we wanted people to grow their own very much their own pace and so so I think most writers have said that there's more freedom because there's more waits to punctuate the story and bring it to life you don't do vo but you do sound effects yes it's not effect to something with this device you have some of these visuals sound so it comes out there is it a cue or how do you treat that well generally for us we've kept sound as two types of sound is a sort of music and atmosphere which is more about setting tone and the way that works in the authoring tool we can about how you made these things is you can just set that as a omnidirectional soap read the music or the sound the atmosphere can be just present it's not spatially specific and then sound effects something like a boom or or you know maybe maybe there's a candle flickering or something and you want to add a sound to it they can be just placed anywhere in space so when we're placing a layer of art in space on the tool we can also place a sound there as well now for our artists so here an artist when you're drawing something designing a comic book for all these formats do you think of it differently because you know for CMYK on a page it's being printed versus being backlit on a tablet versus in these motion comics I've seen like negative space being years how do you think about that there's a lot to think about I think comics are amazing already because the artists and writers are telling a story they're casting their lighting they're acting they're the editor you know as you know they're kind of fully realizing a story so most of the skills that you need are skills you need anyway for comics you know to think about where's the camera were you looking from and is this a wide shot or is this a close-up it's really just a bigger canvas to bring those things to life so close-up can be bigger and bolder and brighter we actually found even with the move to iPad that coloring can be a lot more iridescent and lurid than the printed page much though I love it and so this just accentuates that and the idea of scale and the idea of light because we're telling magic leap is a light field so you're adding color and light into your existing reality which is this is incredibly crisp and and an amazing it's an amazing experience and so this is looking right through it yeah you can look yeah you can look through a portal empty things with depth or you can look at the yeah yeah kind of has to be experienced you guys aren't using any tracking right now mapping meshing of the world is that something that you believe can have effect on the comics reading experience yeah we certainly and we've we've played around with you can put these books and sequences anywhere you can place them above you big small against the wall tied to the floor so you can place them where you want them and there's certainly a lot of fun to be had as we integrate more with meshing down the line but we really felt like this story should be able to be directed by the author to kind of play out in a in a volumetric space in the middle of a room not necessarily having to be tied to the floor or the wall there's a lot of fun to be had with those things but we really we wanted the authoring to be simple we want a deal there's so much you can do with scale size depth motion that we didn't feel like the mesh of the room was totally critical in fact at the moment you can put something big and as far away as you want sit you're not even constrained to your room you can have something huge and along the horizon it's kind of fun the vast majority people out there with smartphones the way they experience a our version of AR is holding their phone up there's a arcade you'll see this as a format that could extend to people experiencing that way or yeah we've gone where the comics partner to oculus in VR we're now announcing as departments imagine which has some things that are very special like spatial special sound and obviously a mixed reality experience very different to the VR experience we do expect to roll out into other AR experiences it's obviously a fast-moving space at the end of the day for us it's like how do you author something in layers was with motion depth and sound and make it a really great story and and that that can work from a phone all the way through to magically being the ultimate expression we're having the most fun with magic leave like it's just kind of mind-bending is great well congrats on launch pen thank you so much for chatting with Manchus normal pleasure Roger okay Jeremy so I think a bear is explaining a little bit more what this experience is as we hopefully were able to show you with some of this capture you know these are floating panels but it's based off of the technology I made fire had already developed for reading comics on existing flatscreen platforms and in fact uses the same tool that they've used to develop all of their motion books which is a motion book tool that you can actually use for free if you go to their website and it's web-based so it's really accessible you can put your assets in there and drag them around and create one of these scenes I mean it's an animation process essentially oh man when I was developing menus for the PlayStation years ago we would have killed for an app like this because we were doing this we were taking layered Photoshop files from game developers and breaking them out into menus and animating them in and you leave the menu and they'd animate out just what they're doing but their tool is so friendly yeah and it's a powerful tool because they want comic creators themselves to be using this tool and animating the comics so we'll take a step back this whole idea of reading comics not on the printed page really took off you know when the iPad came out and a lot of people now read comics on digital platforms people I think been doing it for a long time on their computer screens yeah scans of comics an iPad came out and made the logical sense you can flip the page and there was a very skewed or ' aspect to it right you can interesting actually have the panel a panel flip a page and it will load a new page and then I think comic creators publishers and app developers realize that they want to create experience that would I want to elevate the platform but make it differentiate then the physical need to buy a five gallon comic book well you can't touch a digital comic book there's something missing from that right so that you're not turning a page you can't smell it and so they have to add something to compensate for that I feel in order to make it you know interesting and in many cases the tablet that you have or even the phone that you have you can't get the fidelity right right the you know the pixel resolution certainly certain back in the day like the original iPad where this all started absolutely now I would think the iPad pro actually is starting to look quite a more a bit like paper and a lot of people do read comics on their phones and for those people it made sense for active like comiXology to develop technologies I made fire develop technologies to then transition and so you focus more on the panel unless the whole page at once right that the compensating for the low resolution or just a screen size right right if your canvas is gonna be a five inch or four inch phone at the time yeah then make some way more sense for as a comic book reader to read one panel at a time then we one page at a time and so there were animation tools built in to automate maybe some of the the dialog boxes popping up and have you go from panel to panel to panel but like you said that is a very different just experience then the comic book is a 22 page comic book where the writer and the artists have designed the reading experience well turning the page is kind of kind of crucial I think to the pacing of the comic you enjoy the dialogue the panels on the page the page turn is when a new event or it's an opportunity for a cliffhanger or a video a big action scene and that's kind of like the grammar of the format well the digital format I guess has had these seven years to evolve and they figured out what you're talking about at least as much as they're going to I would think and now they've evolved to the point where they're ready to project it into augmented reality and place these things in three dimensions in front of you I guess it's a lot like having it in virtual reality but instead now with the magic leap it is actually floating in front of you in your environment and so I mean if that gets you some interesting things that gets you a real sense of depth it's not just layers moving in front of each other you can actually feel the sense of there's something that exists in space between you know in front of one another and if you have planes that are doing this it's one thing but you can also put plans at an angle and that is much more effective in 3d than it is in two dimensions we're getting parallax well yes absolutely real parallel you can produce your own parallax by moving around and that's where they can hide some information mm-hmm you know if someone if you're drawing it's kind of harkens back to the old animation days when Walt Disney was doing Snow White you would have a background play a foreground play right and you would actually photograph those together yeah here you can you essentially have different layers of your art and you can have a lot of detail going for you you can let the viewer with magically walk up close and look around a character and in fact break the experience I mean there's no way around that you can now look past where the texture whenever that geometry is where it ends you can see textures that are hidden behind textures that are supposed to be masked off but it's all it's kind of interesting because it's more like a thing that exists in the real world in that case so I'm curious though I mean I don't know if I could call it a comic book like the line between comic book to animation if you call those and and in film animation and two ends of the spectrum this kind of sits somewhere in the middle it's like an animated storyboard but once you bring that out to the size of a TV screen it even loses what you get when you read on a tablet which is still kind of holding something in your hand right like you would a graphic novel this then is almost like a film projected light box or a shadow box right of animated images I almost feel like this clearly is moving towards making a movie like they're taking comic books which are inherently static still imagery and they're animating them they're they're taking the layers and they're moving them in and out Korean these you know intros and outros from the scenes and these transitions which are basically like the first steps towards turning these into real cartoon animated experiences yeah is that what comic book readers want that's and that's the fundamental question right they've it really looks like they've taken an approach where they take an existing technology they've made this existing toolset and platform and library because they have thousands of thousands of comics on the made fire platform that have the motion comic features and they've adapted it to work with a R and an implementation that is very different than experience of reading a comic book and yes it shares the the sense that you know they are using panels and they are using text boxes and there's no voiceover right but at some point it just feels more like a a tone down movie than it does it's nominated comic book that's exactly it like and why isn't there voiceover would there be voice over if there was just more budget in time or would there be more animation if there is much just more budget in time I mean what is the what is the goal and if it is to add all those elements then it takes away something of the you know the imaginary the imaginary role that you play in reading a comic book where you invent what they sound like and they're into Nations and the movement yeah and if a lot of this is adapting existing comic books if we're they're multi publishing not only the physical comic books still but also the iPad version and then also the AR version VR something via version something has got to give like if you fully commit to the VR experience and you script a comic and you have the artist design and animate it for a rxr only right that might be a very different experience than if you're taking a 22 page comic and maybe an old graphic novel and importing it over yeah and they have to meet I understand why they have to meet you the middle ground yeah sort of library purposes but it doesn't feel like it's wholeheartedly in this new platform interestingly they said that you could produce one of these motion books to exist around the user around the play yeah and we didn't see anything like that I think that's because they are sort of beholden to their the platform that they started on which is the two-dimensional screen and I do think it would be more interesting if these things evolved around you sort of like a dear Angelica or one of the experiences of oculus made where you really have to stand up and look around even with Henry you know you're looking around in all directions and there's something that exists all around you that's something you can't do at the comic book you know whenever we review VR games and try new VR experiences we ask ourselves does this new need be all right and VR only bringing presents is it just another way of you know of controlling the camera or does VR actually bring something new to it I think we can ask the same thing of this type of experience doesn't need AR because when we were told let's go check out comic books in in augmented reality my first thought was it was gonna be opening an actual comic book and having tracked pages and in getting animation effects in the physical panels of a 22-page book that wasn't this at all I could imagine if they very have this the art assets animation maybe a blank book right let me hold something physical and then animate the panels on there that could be cool that sounds difficult then you're talking my tracking the actual fold of the pages I do agree with you if you haven't that would be interesting I'm answering like book 4 all that's just blank and you can project whatever you want onto it that would be neat but also very very difficult yeah I think at this point we're still in the experimentation phase right like I think developers are taking the language and the grammar of the tool sets that they know and formats that they know in this case media and comic books and literally throwing it on the wall I really and I have mixed feelings about this because I guys who were running this company I think they're the real deal they're not looking to make to cash in on new technology they are comic book guys that's like to the bone yeah and they believe that comics will evolve into something that's more electronic and they're probably right I'm just not convinced that we've found it yet and I'm not sure what that is and it concerns me that it is gonna move to more towards movies do people want to be that passive when they digest their comics I'm not so sure no I think when I read a comic book the things I like is the physical nature yeah the things I like are the page turning you know it's it's it's it's a two-way communication because I'm adding a lot of my imagination to it as well and so I don't necessarily need a comic book to be fully animated yeah I can go to the movies for that right so I don't know where that middle ground is and I'm not exactly sure this is it but I'm glad they're trying experimenting with it and as a piece of technology it is interesting to see art floating in space to see negative space be used an interesting way with the black and the colors and the white as opposed to having solid outlines you're looking through hey you know it's not exactly interactive with the room you're in but you are interacting with it in your room we should point that out that as an as a magic leap app it actually is the first one I've seen that doesn't take advantage of the room mapping so there's no sense of where the walls are if you obviously it doesn't project the images onto the wall I would have liked at the very least when you're pushing the image away from yourself if it stopped at the wall like if that was a hard limit instead they do let you push through it I'm sure that they could make it work that way and maybe that's the end goal but I was surprised that we saw a magical about that didn't take advantage of their killer feature which is this ability to know where all of your gem trees in the real world and maybe maybe a way to use this maybe way to take advantage of it is the idea of putting art on your walls right so many times I look at beautiful art in comic books and I want to buy a print of it or I want to you know take the page out and put on my wall framing up because I love the art if you have a digital version of that it would be very easy for you have at least been a reality persistent piece of art in your real space that would be pretty neat and that's that's a way I could see digital comics being interface with the real world yeah it's a free app if you have a magic leap I do recommend checking it out in the same way that I would recommend checking this out on the on an iPad or in VR just so you can see what people are thinking about the future of dead tree media and how that might exist in transition to an electronic world all of the catalog that's up there is free including the app itself so there's no cost of entry it's I'm glad that they're doing it and I'll also be curious to see what other people do with their tool especially when it comes to enveloping the user in a 360 experience media in AR and even in VR for the still hasn't been solved yet a lot of problem solving so that comes anyway that's it for this week we'll be back next week with more coverage in VR and AR thanks for watching and we'll see you next time bye youhey everybody's norm from Testim it's jeremy from Testim welcome back to projections we're this week we are diving back into augmented reality it's the future mixed reality XR as that's what magically wants us to call it magically of course working with a bunch of developers game developers and some other app developers for experiences to experiment and dip their toes in of winning reality one of whom is made fired they released an app seven years ago in 2012 on the iPad this is one of the there's not too many of these but it's one of at least two comic book viewing applications that you can download now on your phone on your iPad or even in virtual reality that they launched in the gear VR last year and now they're moving into the augmented reality space so just this week made fire announced that their partnership with magic leap has come to fruition and they were releasing four magically an application that lets you experience their vision of comic books of motion comics in augmented reality it's really a kind of a trippy experience not like flipping open a comic book at all right it's more like the pages or the panels are floating in your space right now they'll take traditional comic book assets or if it's made for the app that even better than they have all the proper layers and they'll break the layers apart and it's very true dimensional it sort of like a viewmaster kind of experience right where you have one layer behind another but they can do interesting things with transitions where they move objects in and out add sound effects and they can now with as you said in on the magically if they can do positional audio so they can put audio around you and correspond to actual objects in the scene the app is available if you haven't magically to try out which I know most of you probably don't we went over to made fires offices in the Bay Area to test this app and also have a conversation with their CEO about just the concept what means to create comic books for augmented reality so check it out so a fire you guys have been around for a while you guys put comics in a digital format give me a little bit of history of where you come from and what made fire does I know you know your comics so yeah we're passionate about storytelling and we're a creates a platform we wanted to enable anyone to tell a story and make a character in a world and my interest is actually always being in if you like storyboarding and the way that the way that story is developed before it becomes you know film TV gaming and I've always adored comics and the way that they are in a relatively easy way to tell a story you know and build character so as a group of founders we wanted to make a place in a way for anyone to publish what we call a motion book which is really a moving words and pictures story and moving coming and we have been I think we're about six years into that journey and this announcement of imagine leap is very much kind of the culmination of all that work right so when you started was there a list of things that you as comic creators and comics fans kind of listed out and quantified as these are the parts of the comic experience that we've never want to change because you're basically doing an adaptation at that point yeah you know one of the partners you have Dave Gibbons famous yet Watchmen and that graphic novel famously it was very difficult to adapt and its creators were outspoken about the format as he reformed yeah the rules we set ourselves were we need to we need to create tools that are very easy to use because comics are you know pencil and paper they should be simple we shouldn't need to know any coding we shouldn't need to know 3d modeling and a lot of animation so the way the tool the made fire tool which is in a browser is very easy to use we also felt that reading is special because you get to control the pace and you're not you know at the mercy of someone else's speed you can sit with the art you can sit with the story you can go backwards and forwards so they were - there were two important rules for us and we didn't want to change the way people make stories already so we didn't want to Challenge anything to do with the dhobi stool set alright you know that would be crazy because that's how people work so we are once people have drawn and written the book with the place that they can build the book and publish the book so transitions effects scale sound so we think of that as building or animating a book in while comics as you guys have been publishing them don't have to exist on a page and maybe no we don't think of them in terms of 22 pages they were still panels are the handles you talk about storyboards those are panels and whatever format you're publishing on iPad VR yeah XR there are still windows that panels yeah into the content yeah their moment comments are exciting because they leave as we said a lot of room for the imagination we don't want to you know if you start animating everything and telling every aspect of the story you need to be Pixar or Disney you know you you're into big budgets big productions we wanted to give moments and let the imagination imagine some of the action and sound between but punctuate those so they're more brought to life than just the PDF because I think that the problem we we felt with digital is and a lot of people felt like oh digital's not as good as my print printed book because you don't you can't smell it you can't hold all your the tangible is is so strong so we really wanted to bring some qualities that are spread that is distinct to digital devices now as we get to magic leap you can actually walk through the story you can actually experience it as part of your world and it's it's a kind of mind-blowing how the grammar of storytelling evolves well let's talk about this experience and specifically when people think about augmented reality mixed reality one of the first things they imagine is something literally popping out of a page where is some connection to the real world but that's not exactly what you're doing here there is no you know tracked object Yorkers aren't popping on a page yeah it is still reading panels but now in your physical space yes we've thought about describing it as walking through a pop-up book it's almost like you know you can kind of see it suspended in space you can put it wherever you want in your room you can walk through it as you've seen you can and bring it nearer to you or further away you can scale it the size of a building or you can have it tiny in your hand it's kind of amazing to think about layers in space with sound emotion and how how much you can do with that well you talk about interactivity you're talking about people physically moving to the content is it was that a direct intent is that something you imagine people will be doing as you're reading this or is it more of a Leanback we actually think is we think is a lot of fun to be in certain scenes to go and see like a Batcave for Batman and actually be able to explore it but I think generally generally we wanted this to be a very an experience that comes to you so in their control with the glasses on you can pull the book nearer or further you can trigger through so the interaction is quite straightforward we feel like we want the storyteller to tell the story to the audience and not try and make loads of different choices mm-hmm we think that's part of the magic of storyboards and comics is that your handheld through a story so this so to answer that there's plenty of room to great Easter eggs on spaces for people to explore if that serves the story but generally we feel like it's quite nice to just sit with it and and feel like you're not in a rush and you're not having to fight anything and you can just hang out with this story time you're adapting existing comic books working with publishers to bring those into the made fire format but you're also doing original content with this in mind I imagine those workflows differ I mean the script look the same or their specific kind of annotated instructions or how to format it in this this format yeah we've created loads of how to's and jump in guides and videos that will sit on made fire and we found that at this point in 2019 probably half of the publishers are creating material in layers and and half are still pretty oriented I'm talking about print publishers for PDF but what we've seen is gaming companies like Blizzard studios like Fox Nickelodeon Disney they're all they're all in layers already so they're actually creating art and text in layers so they've found this tool very native very very logical in fact more logical than collapsing everything into a PDF so we want to keep things with depth and immersive the way writing the feedback we get from writers is our this is a real freedom because instead of having to you know start top left on a page and finish bottom right really just got the access of time and you can reset the scene all that so take a horror for example we can puncture at any moment of a horror because you're kind of resetting the stage rather than in printed sense you have to rely the page turn of a page yeah so every panel is a page turn this opportunity can be exactly or you could build up a scene of different panels so the grammar of storytelling and the way you build a scene so we're we're writing is sequence instead of page kind of thinking of things in sections sequences and moments rather than pages and panels is their opportunity to layout sequences your panels all around you so it's a real 360 yeah we love the weave so we make a whole series of originals with people like Dave Gibbons and Mike Carey and Bill sinkovitz you're coming both legends but also newcomers are using the tools and we see things every day that we didn't think of but our thesis has been keep it reading keep people so we don't voice the books we let people read we don't and we wanted people to grow their own very much their own pace and so so I think most writers have said that there's more freedom because there's more waits to punctuate the story and bring it to life you don't do vo but you do sound effects yes it's not effect to something with this device you have some of these visuals sound so it comes out there is it a cue or how do you treat that well generally for us we've kept sound as two types of sound is a sort of music and atmosphere which is more about setting tone and the way that works in the authoring tool we can about how you made these things is you can just set that as a omnidirectional soap read the music or the sound the atmosphere can be just present it's not spatially specific and then sound effects something like a boom or or you know maybe maybe there's a candle flickering or something and you want to add a sound to it they can be just placed anywhere in space so when we're placing a layer of art in space on the tool we can also place a sound there as well now for our artists so here an artist when you're drawing something designing a comic book for all these formats do you think of it differently because you know for CMYK on a page it's being printed versus being backlit on a tablet versus in these motion comics I've seen like negative space being years how do you think about that there's a lot to think about I think comics are amazing already because the artists and writers are telling a story they're casting their lighting they're acting they're the editor you know as you know they're kind of fully realizing a story so most of the skills that you need are skills you need anyway for comics you know to think about where's the camera were you looking from and is this a wide shot or is this a close-up it's really just a bigger canvas to bring those things to life so close-up can be bigger and bolder and brighter we actually found even with the move to iPad that coloring can be a lot more iridescent and lurid than the printed page much though I love it and so this just accentuates that and the idea of scale and the idea of light because we're telling magic leap is a light field so you're adding color and light into your existing reality which is this is incredibly crisp and and an amazing it's an amazing experience and so this is looking right through it yeah you can look yeah you can look through a portal empty things with depth or you can look at the yeah yeah kind of has to be experienced you guys aren't using any tracking right now mapping meshing of the world is that something that you believe can have effect on the comics reading experience yeah we certainly and we've we've played around with you can put these books and sequences anywhere you can place them above you big small against the wall tied to the floor so you can place them where you want them and there's certainly a lot of fun to be had as we integrate more with meshing down the line but we really felt like this story should be able to be directed by the author to kind of play out in a in a volumetric space in the middle of a room not necessarily having to be tied to the floor or the wall there's a lot of fun to be had with those things but we really we wanted the authoring to be simple we want a deal there's so much you can do with scale size depth motion that we didn't feel like the mesh of the room was totally critical in fact at the moment you can put something big and as far away as you want sit you're not even constrained to your room you can have something huge and along the horizon it's kind of fun the vast majority people out there with smartphones the way they experience a our version of AR is holding their phone up there's a arcade you'll see this as a format that could extend to people experiencing that way or yeah we've gone where the comics partner to oculus in VR we're now announcing as departments imagine which has some things that are very special like spatial special sound and obviously a mixed reality experience very different to the VR experience we do expect to roll out into other AR experiences it's obviously a fast-moving space at the end of the day for us it's like how do you author something in layers was with motion depth and sound and make it a really great story and and that that can work from a phone all the way through to magically being the ultimate expression we're having the most fun with magic leave like it's just kind of mind-bending is great well congrats on launch pen thank you so much for chatting with Manchus normal pleasure Roger okay Jeremy so I think a bear is explaining a little bit more what this experience is as we hopefully were able to show you with some of this capture you know these are floating panels but it's based off of the technology I made fire had already developed for reading comics on existing flatscreen platforms and in fact uses the same tool that they've used to develop all of their motion books which is a motion book tool that you can actually use for free if you go to their website and it's web-based so it's really accessible you can put your assets in there and drag them around and create one of these scenes I mean it's an animation process essentially oh man when I was developing menus for the PlayStation years ago we would have killed for an app like this because we were doing this we were taking layered Photoshop files from game developers and breaking them out into menus and animating them in and you leave the menu and they'd animate out just what they're doing but their tool is so friendly yeah and it's a powerful tool because they want comic creators themselves to be using this tool and animating the comics so we'll take a step back this whole idea of reading comics not on the printed page really took off you know when the iPad came out and a lot of people now read comics on digital platforms people I think been doing it for a long time on their computer screens yeah scans of comics an iPad came out and made the logical sense you can flip the page and there was a very skewed or ' aspect to it right you can interesting actually have the panel a panel flip a page and it will load a new page and then I think comic creators publishers and app developers realize that they want to create experience that would I want to elevate the platform but make it differentiate then the physical need to buy a five gallon comic book well you can't touch a digital comic book there's something missing from that right so that you're not turning a page you can't smell it and so they have to add something to compensate for that I feel in order to make it you know interesting and in many cases the tablet that you have or even the phone that you have you can't get the fidelity right right the you know the pixel resolution certainly certain back in the day like the original iPad where this all started absolutely now I would think the iPad pro actually is starting to look quite a more a bit like paper and a lot of people do read comics on their phones and for those people it made sense for active like comiXology to develop technologies I made fire develop technologies to then transition and so you focus more on the panel unless the whole page at once right that the compensating for the low resolution or just a screen size right right if your canvas is gonna be a five inch or four inch phone at the time yeah then make some way more sense for as a comic book reader to read one panel at a time then we one page at a time and so there were animation tools built in to automate maybe some of the the dialog boxes popping up and have you go from panel to panel to panel but like you said that is a very different just experience then the comic book is a 22 page comic book where the writer and the artists have designed the reading experience well turning the page is kind of kind of crucial I think to the pacing of the comic you enjoy the dialogue the panels on the page the page turn is when a new event or it's an opportunity for a cliffhanger or a video a big action scene and that's kind of like the grammar of the format well the digital format I guess has had these seven years to evolve and they figured out what you're talking about at least as much as they're going to I would think and now they've evolved to the point where they're ready to project it into augmented reality and place these things in three dimensions in front of you I guess it's a lot like having it in virtual reality but instead now with the magic leap it is actually floating in front of you in your environment and so I mean if that gets you some interesting things that gets you a real sense of depth it's not just layers moving in front of each other you can actually feel the sense of there's something that exists in space between you know in front of one another and if you have planes that are doing this it's one thing but you can also put plans at an angle and that is much more effective in 3d than it is in two dimensions we're getting parallax well yes absolutely real parallel you can produce your own parallax by moving around and that's where they can hide some information mm-hmm you know if someone if you're drawing it's kind of harkens back to the old animation days when Walt Disney was doing Snow White you would have a background play a foreground play right and you would actually photograph those together yeah here you can you essentially have different layers of your art and you can have a lot of detail going for you you can let the viewer with magically walk up close and look around a character and in fact break the experience I mean there's no way around that you can now look past where the texture whenever that geometry is where it ends you can see textures that are hidden behind textures that are supposed to be masked off but it's all it's kind of interesting because it's more like a thing that exists in the real world in that case so I'm curious though I mean I don't know if I could call it a comic book like the line between comic book to animation if you call those and and in film animation and two ends of the spectrum this kind of sits somewhere in the middle it's like an animated storyboard but once you bring that out to the size of a TV screen it even loses what you get when you read on a tablet which is still kind of holding something in your hand right like you would a graphic novel this then is almost like a film projected light box or a shadow box right of animated images I almost feel like this clearly is moving towards making a movie like they're taking comic books which are inherently static still imagery and they're animating them they're they're taking the layers and they're moving them in and out Korean these you know intros and outros from the scenes and these transitions which are basically like the first steps towards turning these into real cartoon animated experiences yeah is that what comic book readers want that's and that's the fundamental question right they've it really looks like they've taken an approach where they take an existing technology they've made this existing toolset and platform and library because they have thousands of thousands of comics on the made fire platform that have the motion comic features and they've adapted it to work with a R and an implementation that is very different than experience of reading a comic book and yes it shares the the sense that you know they are using panels and they are using text boxes and there's no voiceover right but at some point it just feels more like a a tone down movie than it does it's nominated comic book that's exactly it like and why isn't there voiceover would there be voice over if there was just more budget in time or would there be more animation if there is much just more budget in time I mean what is the what is the goal and if it is to add all those elements then it takes away something of the you know the imaginary the imaginary role that you play in reading a comic book where you invent what they sound like and they're into Nations and the movement yeah and if a lot of this is adapting existing comic books if we're they're multi publishing not only the physical comic books still but also the iPad version and then also the AR version VR something via version something has got to give like if you fully commit to the VR experience and you script a comic and you have the artist design and animate it for a rxr only right that might be a very different experience than if you're taking a 22 page comic and maybe an old graphic novel and importing it over yeah and they have to meet I understand why they have to meet you the middle ground yeah sort of library purposes but it doesn't feel like it's wholeheartedly in this new platform interestingly they said that you could produce one of these motion books to exist around the user around the play yeah and we didn't see anything like that I think that's because they are sort of beholden to their the platform that they started on which is the two-dimensional screen and I do think it would be more interesting if these things evolved around you sort of like a dear Angelica or one of the experiences of oculus made where you really have to stand up and look around even with Henry you know you're looking around in all directions and there's something that exists all around you that's something you can't do at the comic book you know whenever we review VR games and try new VR experiences we ask ourselves does this new need be all right and VR only bringing presents is it just another way of you know of controlling the camera or does VR actually bring something new to it I think we can ask the same thing of this type of experience doesn't need AR because when we were told let's go check out comic books in in augmented reality my first thought was it was gonna be opening an actual comic book and having tracked pages and in getting animation effects in the physical panels of a 22-page book that wasn't this at all I could imagine if they very have this the art assets animation maybe a blank book right let me hold something physical and then animate the panels on there that could be cool that sounds difficult then you're talking my tracking the actual fold of the pages I do agree with you if you haven't that would be interesting I'm answering like book 4 all that's just blank and you can project whatever you want onto it that would be neat but also very very difficult yeah I think at this point we're still in the experimentation phase right like I think developers are taking the language and the grammar of the tool sets that they know and formats that they know in this case media and comic books and literally throwing it on the wall I really and I have mixed feelings about this because I guys who were running this company I think they're the real deal they're not looking to make to cash in on new technology they are comic book guys that's like to the bone yeah and they believe that comics will evolve into something that's more electronic and they're probably right I'm just not convinced that we've found it yet and I'm not sure what that is and it concerns me that it is gonna move to more towards movies do people want to be that passive when they digest their comics I'm not so sure no I think when I read a comic book the things I like is the physical nature yeah the things I like are the page turning you know it's it's it's it's a two-way communication because I'm adding a lot of my imagination to it as well and so I don't necessarily need a comic book to be fully animated yeah I can go to the movies for that right so I don't know where that middle ground is and I'm not exactly sure this is it but I'm glad they're trying experimenting with it and as a piece of technology it is interesting to see art floating in space to see negative space be used an interesting way with the black and the colors and the white as opposed to having solid outlines you're looking through hey you know it's not exactly interactive with the room you're in but you are interacting with it in your room we should point that out that as an as a magic leap app it actually is the first one I've seen that doesn't take advantage of the room mapping so there's no sense of where the walls are if you obviously it doesn't project the images onto the wall I would have liked at the very least when you're pushing the image away from yourself if it stopped at the wall like if that was a hard limit instead they do let you push through it I'm sure that they could make it work that way and maybe that's the end goal but I was surprised that we saw a magical about that didn't take advantage of their killer feature which is this ability to know where all of your gem trees in the real world and maybe maybe a way to use this maybe way to take advantage of it is the idea of putting art on your walls right so many times I look at beautiful art in comic books and I want to buy a print of it or I want to you know take the page out and put on my wall framing up because I love the art if you have a digital version of that it would be very easy for you have at least been a reality persistent piece of art in your real space that would be pretty neat and that's that's a way I could see digital comics being interface with the real world yeah it's a free app if you have a magic leap I do recommend checking it out in the same way that I would recommend checking this out on the on an iPad or in VR just so you can see what people are thinking about the future of dead tree media and how that might exist in transition to an electronic world all of the catalog that's up there is free including the app itself so there's no cost of entry it's I'm glad that they're doing it and I'll also be curious to see what other people do with their tool especially when it comes to enveloping the user in a 360 experience media in AR and even in VR for the still hasn't been solved yet a lot of problem solving so that comes anyway that's it for this week we'll be back next week with more coverage in VR and AR thanks for watching and we'll see you next time bye you\n"