Interactive

For working musicians, interacting with your audience is an important part of playing live. And so is getting paid. Phil the Tip Jar is fun and quirky and gives something back to fans, dispensing "thank you" cards when it detects money going in the top.

A new NASA VR experience is letting viewers explore the chaotic heart of our galaxy from the perspective of the supermassive black hole lurking at its heart, Sagittarius A*. The video was created from a combination of supercomputer simulations and data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

​It was three years ago that we first heard about Orbi Prime sunglasses, which use four integrated cameras to record 360-degree interactive video. Orbi has now unveiled a more robust version of the glasses, but perhaps more interestingly, it's also built the technology into a football helmet.

Black Mirror's latest instalment, called Bandersnatch, presents audiences with one of the most sophisticated interactive film experiences to date, but is this a glimpse of the future of entertainment, or a dead-end experiment that leeches out everything fundamentally important to storytelling?​

This Halloween scientists at MIT’s Media Lab are embarking on a massive social experiment. Called BeeMe, the project will let internet users control a real human actor. New Atlas reached out to Niccolo Pescetelli, one of the creators behind the experiment to find out exactly what is about to happen.

Augmented reality can bring a book to life by pointing a smartphone or tablet camera at coded objects on a page and viewing the results on the smart device's screen. Magik Book has created its own spin with brochures that sync with a tablet and launch digital content when a page is turned.​

​​Brooklyn-based designer Richard Clarkson has been experimenting with artificial cloud designs for several years now. His latest invention is the Floating Cloud – a magnetically levitating ambient lamp that flickers through different colored LED modes in response to the sound in a room.​

Before "interactive movie" video games there were Choose Your Own Adventure books. Streaming video technology has now allowed Netflix to embrace the concept and release its first interactive "branching" narrative​ program that gives viewers a say in how the story progresses.

​​Although GoPro may have already announced its intention to do so, Garmin has beaten it to the punch by releasing a 360-degree spherical actioncam of its own. Called the VIRB 360, it shoots footage at a resolution of 5.7K/30fps, automatically stitching it together into a 4K/30fps interactive video.

​​If you have trouble deciding on the best angle from which to shoot your videos, then you might like what GoPro has in the pipeline. The company's Fusion camera shoots 360-degree panoramic footage that the viewer can subsequently pan and tilt within, to view the action from different perspectives.

Until activated by motion​, the Lumes wall panel from Australia's ENESS looks pretty standard. But once brought to life, an integrated LED array can display images and relatively complex animations. The first real-world application of the Lumes panel is at Cabrini Hospital in Malvern, Victoria.

A group of Korean entrepreneurs are looking to make interactive TV-viewing even simpler. Their Soundlly system transmits an inaudible ultrasound tone along with TV broadcasts, which allows users' mobile devices to serve as "second screens." ​