The current pandemic situation restrictions have redefined how educators and content creators create engaging content. The transition to the new digital environment has presented many new challenges for how these groups interact with their audiences. One of the main difficulties they have faced has been the learning curve required to use a variety of software platforms and stay creative at the same time.
How do you produce engaging and attractive content for different audiences when timing and technology skills are limited?
UBC iSchool PhD student Vanessa Figueiredo has an answer to this question. She is a co-founder and team member of a start-up called Tagbly (Text Audio Graphics Assembly), a new company focused on developing a technology that creates multimedia content with interactive elements without having to use complex video editing software. From the viewer’s perspective, it looks like a video. But from the creator’s, it is interactive and synchronized media content.
“Tagbly is an acronym for ‘Text Audio Graphics Assembly, meaning that content creators just need to ‘drag and drop’ images, links, annotations – even videos – and have them synchronized with any audio and voice recording.” Vanessa Figueiredo, iSchool PhD Student and Tagbly co-founder
Tagbly allows educators and content creators to produce interactive presentations, even if they don’t have the time or skills. They can choose images, 3D models, 360 pictures, links, videos or any document and synchronize these data with their voice recordings. If more content needs to be added later, users will just need to update the part requiring the change without having to redo the whole presentation.
When presenting, creators will have the ability to control everything, from pausing the presentation to changing the view angle. On the other end, viewers will see something like an interactive video that allows zooming of images and immersive experiences, such as exploring a museum’s collection while listening to the museum’s curator, or answering polls and clicking on the links while the presentation is playing. It allows viewers to interact like never before and makes it easier than ever for everyone to create content.
Together with the rest of the Tagbly team, Vanessa has been working with the Beaty Museum to develop an interactive collection using Tagbly. “We are very excited to work with the Beaty Museum at UBC and use Tagbly to make their collections and learning initiatives available to people around the world!“, Vanessa said. We invite you to explore and play with this technology by clicking on the Beaty Museum demo below:
Tagbly is currently a patented technology, and it is one of the participants in the Distance Accelerator Program at the New Ventures BC. If you wish to learn more about this technology, please contact Vanessa Figueiredo at vanesfi@mail.ubc.ca.
