Chapter 3 (form)

Throughout the chapter, I found the author’s description of the Shakespeare project very interesting. On one hand, it was cool to see how the virtual format allowed the text to be displayed in creative, unconventional ways, with each act of the Midsummer Night’s Dream floating in 3D space and each character’s dialogue being displayed in a different color. It reminded me of the video we watched in class last week, where he argued that since the virtual text is not limited to the constraints of paper text, we’re missing out on a huge opportunity by continuing to display text in a conventional, paper-like way. It made me think of reading apps like Kindle which try to mimic the paper reading experience as much as possible rather than be creative with their displays as a comparison to his virtual text displays. While I think these types of 3D text displays are very fun to navigate, it did may me question the legibility of the text and if it may end up hindering the reading experience rather than enhancing it. In this chapter, he does address the concern of different angles, orientations, and speeds of the display making it difficult to read, and suggests varying type sizes and limited movement as solutions. Still, Shakespeare’s texts are already so dense that zooming out and having multiple acts overlap seemed a bit disorienting, and I wondered if our eyes would get tired after reading the 3D text for a while. I think it would be really interesting to see his ideas on shorter texts like poetry or short stories.