StoryCast is an experimental digital storytelling service that
lets people use their camera phones and other mobile devices to
easily create and instantly share stories with friends and family.
Each story consists of a sort of narrated slide show of photos
accompanied by the storyteller's voice.
StoryCast is spontaneous. Users don't have to wait until they
arrive home or travel to a WIFI hotspot to create and share stories.
Just as the Polaroid made it easy to snap informal pictures that
could be viewed instantly, camera phones present the opportunity
to instantly share narrated photo journals.
How it works
Composition is radically simple: Using the mobile phone handset
as a microphone, users speak into the phone while clicking on thumbnails
of photos they want to describe or that illustrate a story. The
user experience is similar to recording a traditional voicemail,
with the benefit of allowing users to augment the audio track with
pictures.
Once the handset has recorded both the audio track and the corresponding
sequence of pictures, it sends the whole message via email, HTTP
or MMS. The team implemented this prototype on a iPAQ h6315 camera
phone running the pocket PC phone edition operating system. The
organizational structure of a story can be represented in SMIL
or MPV (XML formats for multimedia presentations).