The BBC Research and Development team (BBC R&D) are constantly experimenting with new ways of reaching audiences and telling stories.
Producer Nicky Birch and creative technologist Henry Cooke asked me to come up with a suitable story for their latest exploration, combining smartspeaker and touchscreen technology.
The result was Five Days, Five Dates, snappily summarised as ‘Cyrano de Bergerac for the Tinder generation.’
You play as the best friend of the protagonist who is desperate to find a date in time for her sister’s wedding at the weekend. Because of her terrible track record with dating, she’s enlisted you to be her ‘wingman’ listening in on each date (through the smartspeaker) and offering her real-time advice via a backchannel (your phone or tablet) using text, voice and images.
The script was co-written by Nosa Eke and me. If you don’t know Nosa’s work yet, you should and probably will.
There’s a summary of the project (including a video) over on the BBC R&D blog, and they’ve even published a detailed user testing report.
Five Days, Five Dates isn’t due to be released publicly but I’ll let you know if that plan changes.
David Varela 