As "Interactive Cinema" really comes true...

Today is Oct 18, year 2025. Today the great interactive movie "The Life of Steve Jobs" will be playing on the internet after its 4-year production. This billion-dollar-interactive film is a huge project, in which 4800 clips have been produced by 260 people, and an estimation of 10 million of people will log on to explore this story tomorrow. Being interviewed this afternoon, the director of this work said that....

Imagine some day when there will be a new business as big as today's movie industry or TV industry that is based on the service of telling people stories. Different from consuming both them and all the other kinds of media entertainment, people are gonna create their own story lines, and no artifact (like a movie or a TV program) needs to exist. The stories will be created as people interact with the online "interactive cinema". By giving the cinema information about what you are interested next, the audience will be able to find out what happens next in this journey of exploration. It is totally different from the old thinking of interactive movie, because in that case there are only several, say, 6, possibilities of the story, since the director needs to plan all these possible stories, and ask the audience to choose at the points they think appropriate. In the future "interactive cinema", the audience will decide how they want to explore, when they want to go to a different direction, and how many stories can there possibly be. It is also different from playing games because all the stories will be real-world stories, and the visual appearance will be real people's real event in their lives.

People will pay for this interactive cinema - just like they pay for the movies or cable TV today. Why? It is fun to go to this new kind of cinema because everything is depends on what you ask for - you see what you describe, what you want to see - and other than that, you even find surprises that you can't even think of.

Sounds cool. But still far away. With commonsense reasoning, it seems at the first stage that the interactive film story is not impossible. However, we still have lots of lots of questions. How are we going to design the whole interaction? How are we gonna make the immersion such that people will feel deeply engaged - or even addicted? How are we decide how the video clips in the repository should be like in order to make the whole thing smooth, not fragmented? How do we ensure that the "rythm" of the whole story will be really fascinating?

How do we keep good continuity?

The way people get/view media has changed since late 20th century. In this post-modern era, everything is modulized, and the process of viewing/narration becomes multi-linear as hyperform is intensively employed. the above questions are raised as technology brings us to this new era, but the industry is still staying at the stage of artifact-production, because no one has really provided solutions to these problems, or even tried to solve these questions. To answer these questions, maybe we need to know more about commonsense reasoning, and more about stories.