How do you make an interactive video? Or an interactive web experience?
It’s not as hard as it looks.
You can use YouTube to make interactive experiences online with the YouTube video annotation feature.
How make your first interactive YouTube experience:
- Decide on what experience you want to present. It can be a game, a website, a story, or anything you wish to include interactivity.
- Create your video with enough space in the video to add clearly placed buttons (using the annotation feature. We will get to this in a moment.)
- Edit your video into separate short videos, with each individual video corresponding to a button. So if you are creating an interactive story, you would have a button leading to two different sections of the video, where the user makes a choice and continues the story along a unique story line. If you are making a website this way, each button would correspond to a section of that website. Use your imagination.
- Add buttons to your video using the YouTube annotation tool. The annotation tool allows you to add a button with a hyperlink, anywhere in your video. You can set the duration of the button to precisely allow the user interactivity at certain points.
Here are some of my favorite uses of the YouTube video annotation feature:
The Time Machine: An Interactive Adventure!
Youtube Street Fighter – A game
BooneOakley.com – Home Page
I love Internet – An interactive ad for Zooppa, created by our very own Kevin Butler!
(Although you may know him as BrainofButler here on Zooppa)