The Metamorphosis for iPad is an interactive, illustrated narrative iPad application built around the complete text of Franz Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis.' Developed as part of my masters thesis at Parsons, it represents my first attempt at multimedia, interactive digital storytelling and continues to be a work in progress.

Video Simulation of Scene 1 (01:20):

Abstract:

This project takes digital tablets, such as the iPad, as a medium that breaks a rift between the nostalgia for paper fiction and the ever-present allure of multimedia screens. Tablets occupy a space that is somewhere in between a laptop and a book. Tablets, like books, are hand held. Their interface is tactile, and bypasses the need for mouse or keyboard as a middleman. However, there are no pages. At least there doesn't need to be. Instead, the iPad presents an infinite canvas, ripe for a breadth of multimedia, gestural interactions. The 'book' can now become a unique story object.

Franz Kafka's, 'The Metamorphosis,' provides an ideal foundation on which to build these concepts. It is an iconic work of literature, and a work with content heavily dependent on the story's space and atmosphere. Through sincere consideration of the rich symbols, imagery and abstract allegory of Kafka's work, I sought to design a unique, graphically-driven user experience that illustrates the story and leverages the properties of the tablet to add meaningful, metaphoric content to the metamorphosis resident in the story - updating his work, and the reading experience in general, for an audience reading more and more on screens.

Illustrations - Chapter 1:

Video/Voiceover Thesis Presentation (13:45):