Some of our readers may remember Spotlight Stories, a platform of interactive 360-degree shorts that Google and Motorola created for a small group of Android devices. Spotlight Stories has enormous potential, but with such limited support, it never fully took off. In Mountain View they decided to expand their horizons and bring it to YouTube with a new video called Special Delivery, which perfectly captures the Christmas spirit.
Virtual reality, augmented reality, 360-degree videos. The technology already exists. Now we need the developments, or better said, the stories. Hardware support is improving, and in 2016 we will see on the shelves (or so we hope) all the headsets they have promised us. Games are just one part of the equation. We also want documentaries, shorts, films, music videos, tutorials, travel guides, and a long etcetera. All the big names of the Web know this, including Google. The initial response from Mountain View was Spotlight Stories, a platform developed by the ATAP division (formerly Motorola) that has its own Android app. The content there is of very high quality, but Spotlight Stories suffers some restrictions, starting with its list of compatible devices.
On this occasion, Google decided to move (partially) Spotlight Stories' features to YouTube, and as a first action published an excellent interactive 360-degree story called Special Delivery. Christmas night approaches, and a friendly janitor begins to detect strange movements, caused by a Santa Claus leaving gifts in every home he visits. The poor janitor has a rough time chasing the round man in red, but at the same time we can see activity in the neighborhood, like a child dreaming of a bicycle, and a man having a mortal battle with a giant turkey he can't fit in the oven.
Special Delivery is a work by Aardman Animations, a company much better known for its efforts in Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit. The short has about ten storylines to follow, three different ways to see its ending, and more than sixty moments in which we can intervene, so we need to watch it several times to know everything it holds. If we watch it from the YouTube app on Android with a compatible device, the Spotlight Stories experience will be complete, but using a computer with Chrome or Firefox, what we get is a 360-degree preview compatible with Cardboard, which is also not to be missed.
Read the official announcement.
