unmediated

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.

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).