Startup Audience Entertainment aims to get movie watchers twisting and turning as they play games together in the theater.
I wrote about the company a few of months ago, when it was about to release a software development kit for outside developers to create content on the platform. The demos I saw then were pretty simple — for example a game where I jumped around to tap falling cubes, which was fun, but not a particularly deep experience.
The content is advancing quickly, at least judging from what I saw during a visit to the Audience Entertainment office earlier this week. As you can see in the video above, the team has created demos that go beyond simple games and feature environments for users to explore — first, panoramic nature footage, and then a noir-ish city for players to walk around.
Chief Marketing Officer Adam Cassels described these demos as “a teaser” for the kinds of applications that the company is trying to support. And as you watch the video, keep in mind that these experiences aren’t really designed for three dudes in an office, but for larger groups of people playing together. Cassels said the technology is currently available in 100 theaters in the United States, and the aim is to bring it “anywhere where there’s a big group of people and a large screen.”
“It’s like any new technology — you walk abefore you run,” added CEO Barry Grieff. “You know, when home video came out, they had stuff on it that they probably didn’t want on later, right? Then they got more sophisticated. The same thing is happening here.”