Google has filed a patent, titled Web-Based System for Generation of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos, which suggests that it will bring interactive gaming to YouTube, according to a report on bnet.
The patent, filed in February of this year and published this month, describes a way to provide interactive features for digital videos, and in particular to interactive video annotations enabling control of video playback locations and creation of interactive games. The patent description reads:
A video may have associated with it one or more annotations, which modify the appearance and/or behavior of a video as it was originally submitted to an online video hosting site. Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video. Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associated with a time of the target video, which can be either the video with which the annotation is associated, or a separate video. Selecting such annotations causes playback of the target video to begin at the associated time. Such annotations can be used to construct interactive games using videos, such as a game in which clicking on different portions of a video leads to different outcomes.
To me it sounds like we could possibly be seeing a version of the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books on YouTube… Google has yet to comment on the patent.
