Disney Animated
$13.99
This is the big book of Walt Disney; the man, his films, his company, its history, and innovations, but made specifically for the iPad so it can come alive the way you’d expect a Disney book would. The illustrations and photos awaken and play as clips, characters unexpectedly march across the margins, animated scenes give up their many layers with a tap, and tracing your fingers across the right page can produce swirls of snow and frost.
You can handle physical objects, turning about character sculptures and celluloid frames in your hands as if you’d just picked them up off an animator’s shelf. This includes Pinocchio as a wooden marionette and a 19th century praxinoscope, a mirrored drum that makes images move when you spin it.
There are workshop sections where you can learn to animate a ball, change a horse’s expression, and direct Wreck-It Ralph’s Vanellope as a computer-animated model. Color Maps arrange frames from all 52 released films as chronological layers, allowing you to see the different tones and themes from one film to the next.
The film catalog is organized as a timeline with movie releases placed alongside outside milestones such as the Moon landing, the discovery of DNA, the popularity of The Beatles, and the publishing of Harry Potter. Movie entries include posters, awards, characters, pencil tests, and zoomable illustrations. If you own any of the films or soundtracks through iTunes, then they’ll appear here as well.
It’s a beautiful piece of interactive work that thankfully avoids the usual sense of self-promotion for something more educational, thanks in part I think to the involvement of Theodore Grey, creator the The Elements app. This is Disney trying to share what they themselves have learned over the years.
Tomorrowland
Free
This app recreates the journey director Brad Bird and writer Damon Lindelof had when exploring a mysterious box of long-lost Disney materials marked “1952”. It was found in 2008 when Walt Disney sent maintenance workers down into the “morgue”, a storage area dating back to the company’s earliest days, to clear out the space. Unexpectedly they uncovered a number of forgotten treasures including artwork, models, painted cells and this box which turned out to hold a collection of materials linked to Walt’s early fascination with the technology, science, and innovations of the future.
Like peeling away layers of a mystery, this app uses photos and audio clips to take you step-by-step through the journey of discovering the box, opening it, and pulling out its mysterious contents one-by-one.
I won’t ruin the surprise, but will say that this time capsule’s wonder is in the details and an appreciation of history. To most it will be very boring at first glance, but to those with patience, curiosity, and an hunger for behind-the-scenes secrets it’s a rare treat.
Ikea Catalogue
Free
Building upon last year’s interactive experience, the 2014 edition of the IKEA Catalogue adds even more embedded videos, slideshows, room panoramas, layered décor scenes, and web links. All of these are included in the digital edition being offered for download within the app, but you can also activate them in the traditional paper catalogue by pointing your mobile camera at the pages marked with an orange plus where Augmented Reality technology can bring them to life. It’s pretty simple. You point, you tap, and everything I’ve mentioned above works.
Using the all-new 3D Furniture tool takes some practice. This is where your camera can make it look like a piece of furniture from the catalogue is sitting in your home. You activate it by scanning a page with a 3D symbol on it (page 170 in the American edition). You’ll need to clear an empty a space in your home where you’d like to place the virtual furniture and lay the catalogue’s cover on the floor (or a printout of it will do too). The cover acts as marker so your camera knows where to fit the virtual model into view.
A menu lets you pick from a selection of furniture pieces. Swiping the screen faces the furniture the way you want and then it’s up to you to step nearer or farther away from the catalogue cover to change the size of the model, although in no way will the measurements be exact. If you want to see if a bed or couch is too large to fit in a room you’ll still need to break out the measuring tape.
The 3D Furniture tool is useful only in showing you how a piece will “look” in your home and even then it can’t reproduce how colours or patterns might change in your home lighting. It will help you spot clashes in style and as a gimmicky can make exploring a sales catalogue a little more fun.
Bramble Berry Tales Book One – The Story of Kalkalilh
$2.99
After gaining global recognition for adapting the works of Beatrix Potter, Charles M. Schultz, and Sandra Boyton into Children’s eBook experiences, Vancouver’s Loud Crow Interactive is now leveraging their fame to do the same for a collection of oral tradition stories from Canada’s First Nations people.
The Story of Kalkalilh is the first and it comes to us from the Squamish. The book introduces us to Lily and Thomas who hear it as a bedtime story told to them by their Mooshum (Grandfather). He explains how a group of children, who refused to go to bed on time, wander off into the woods where they are captured by a witch named Kakalilh, known for eating “the toes of children as if they were grapes”, and must use their wits to escape. To adults it’s a familiar story that you can say this is simply a Canadian Hansel and Gretel. The witch, especially the spirits in her lair, is scary and may be too much for very wee audiences.
Most of the illustrations are full of warm, earthy tones and enthusiastic faces. The actors voicing the characters are inviting and real. Every page has animated effects with movements and sounds that are triggered by touch. Some of these, such as falling leaves you can scatter with your fingertips, are very atmospheric.
You can tap selected words to hear their equivalent spoken in Squamish and have Thomas and Lily share a bit of their lives in the process. The book offers narrated, autoplay, and a “read by myself” mode that you can activate for English, French, and Squamish. It’s a lovely storybook experience.
Publisher Loud Crow Interactive and creators Rival Schools will be moving on to two more books offering tales from the Cree and Halkomelem peoples. I’ve longed wanted to see tales from our First Nations people brought to life like this and so hope it’s only the beginning.
