Everyone is familiar with the interrogation scenes in crime dramas. Beads of sweat collect on the forehead of the suspect while a polygraph needle makes feverish scrawls which indicate whether the accused is telling the truth or lying.
Devices that derive from fluctuations in the tone of voice or through measurable changes in skin resistance, whether someone bears false testimony, are commonly referred to as polygraph. If you are a viewer at home wishing for the same experience, good news! Soon the The ORF will offer both its own lie detector online and through an app, thanks to Tonio.
Even if the lie detector was developed only for a short-lived program, such as the highly anticipated four-episode full-length series Pregau, it is a wonderful example of how the synchronous experience of TV with the Smartphone can offer a playful added value.
We are all the more pleased that we were able to win over ORF with this idea and that we are are working at full speed on the implementation.
On the 26th of September the time will come: At 8:15 pm the first episode will be shown on ORF1, the other three parts to follow within eight days. We hope the experience is engaging enough to lure crime buffs to the screen. The trick to making this so magical is that we embed information which corresponds to the storyline into the audio, which transmits to users’ mobile devices.
The idea, which was officially presented a few days ago, offers so much more: The well-known court psychiatrist Dr. Lee Haller cleverly comments on the motives of the protagonists on a meta-level and helps to fill in the dossiers throughout course of the show. Anyone who takes interest in looking ahead at the website or the app has access to exclusive footage. Think of it as having the bonus features before the show starts. The bonus content offers a pedigree which helps to find your way around in the complex social network of community residents.
Our partnership with the ORF has begun a great collaboration among colleagues and friends, because it is also common to enter new multimedia territories and to stage a synchronous experience and thereby to establish a new landscape of media experiences. The fact that real experts like Dr. Haller can be interwoven with fictitious stories is another special plus in the search for immersion.
The media coverage so far has been correspondingly high: the press, the standard and TV media are already running headlines about the show. Pregau is one of the most exciting stories in a long time and therefore an ideal vehicle for our “experiment”.
And that is nothing but the pure truth.
