The Metamorphosis

for iPad

Joel Golombeck

My 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, a work with content heavily dependent on the space and atmosphere, and a work that is close to my soul. 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.

Click for a link to the video simulation for scene 1: http://vimeo.com/23235191
Click for the complete final presentation: http://vimeo.com/23524848