Calvium announces that the latest app from The Guardian newspaper – “King’s Cross, London – Streetstories” – is being powered by Calvium’s AppFurnace platform. The Guardian app is an immersive audio walking guide with a difference – as users wander through the streets of King’s Cross, the app automatically activates sounds, music and stories relevant to their GPS location, providing listeners with old and new tales from this fascinating part of London.
The app comes in two flavours, a compact version featuring ten stories for both iPhone and Android, and a longer iPhone edition – Streetstories Extra – offering over seventy stories. Users outside of King’s Cross can still listen to the stories at home using an interactive map interface.
The Guardian created the multi-layered sound experience within Streetstories using AppFurnace development tools. The creative team marked interesting locations around King’s Cross on an online map and associated them with layers of ambient sounds, music and spoken stories. The Guardian team then worked with AppFurnace developers to customise the built-in audio engine with sophisticated fading, merging and playback rules to create a final experience that is unique to each user of the app.
“Working with AppFurnace to create the immersive sound-scape that is Guardian Streetstories has been just fantastic. We have been able to compose, lay-out, test and refine over 70 original recordings to create this app within a couple of months,” comments Francesca Panetta, Guardian Special Projects Editor, Multimedia.
Jo Reid, Sales and Marketing Director for AppFurnace adds: “This app gives you an absorbing and real connection to the streets. We are proud to have developed the powerful creativity tools that have enabled such talented media artists and designers to compose it..” She continues: “Analytics built into the app will help The Guardian to explore how visitors experience and respond to the located stories in Streetstories. We’re sure that soon they will be able to report that visitors to King’s Cross find Streetstories to be just as engaging and enjoyable as the project that created it.”
The AppFurnace app development environment is produced by Calvium Ltd, a Bristol-based start-up and resident of the Pervasive Media Studio. AppFurnace provides intuitive, drag-and-drop screen design tools giving app creators precise control over the layout and look of a mobile app down to the last pixel, a collection of widgets including audio, video and twitter feeds, location triggering, familiar scripting with JavaScript, responsive interfaces, and a preview capability that lets you check that your designs look great on a range of devices. Prospective users can sign up at appfurnace.com and try it out. Registered users can get started straight away for free – no installation or credit card required – and pay only when ready to publish.
