Interactive cinema
Interactive cinema tries to give the audience an active role in the showing of movies. The movie Kinoautomat by Czechoslovakian director Raduz Cincera presented in the Czech Pavilion in Expo '67 in Montreal is considered to be the first cinema-like interactive movie. The availability of computers for the display of interactive video has made it easier to create interactive movies.
Another newer definition of interactive cinema is a video game which is a hybrid between participation and viewing, giving the player - or viewer, as it were - a strong amount of control in the characters' decisions. A prominent pioneer of such a technique is the successful Hideo Kojima, whose gameplay often takes a priority to the storyline and long cutscenes. His game Policenauts, a point and click adventure game which has shootout sequences (that make use of the lightgun peripheral on the Sega Saturn version of the game), has a subtitle which reads "Interactive cinema" on the cover art of all versions of said game, which is an early example of a prominent game developer labelling their game as such. A recent incarnation of an idea similar to this one is Fahrenheit, (censored version released in US and Canada as "Indigo Prophecy") a game dubbed as "interactive cinema" by its France-based developer, Quantic Dream.
1992 saw the release of North America's first interactive motion picture, I'm Your Man. Certain Loews Theatres locations were retrofitted with controllers to allow audiences to vote on decisions made by the main character. Although initially touted as the first step toward virtual reality cinema, the experiment was a failure and the equipment was removed from theaters by 1994.
The Canadian-produced Late Fragment premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007, and has been screened numerous times at special engagements, but was not released in theaters.
See also
- Cutscene
- Interactive art
- Interaction design
- Interactive movie
- Interactive video
- Laserdisc video game
- Participatory cinema