Magic and Storytelling / A magical tale – Marco Tempest@TED2012 from onformative on Vimeo.Magic has always been inextricably linked to storytelling. If a book or film is compelling enough, it will whisk away its audience and make them believe in the world they are immersed in, no matter how unreal it may be. Film specifically is predicated on the act of illusion. Indeed, many of its essential techniques were discovered by the magician Georges Méliès. Techniques such as editing and computer animation are able to create increasingly convincing worlds that are indistinguishable from reality. Part of that magic is allowing ourselves to believe in it by willingly suspending our own disbelief.Marco Tempest, the self-proclaimed Cyber Magician who was last seen flipping smartphones like they were a pack of playing cards, is interested in how closely related magic and storytelling are. A modern day Méliès, he investigates this connection through his use of technology. Now he is exploring the narrative of illusion via augmented reality.Calling on the help of Onformative and Checksum5, Tempest developed an augmented reality supplement to a TED Talk he gave on Magic and Storytelling. Using the programming language vvvv, they developed an application that read the magician’s gestures in real time. The images that were manifested were literally conjured by a specific set of hand and body movements made possible using Kinect technology. Through the video, he explains the narrative nature of magic and the magical nature of storytelling.Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Tempest envisions a future where our experience with fiction, whether it be through magic or storytelling, cannot be distinguished from reality. For as long as there has been any kind fiction, we have stood in awe of the imagination and its ability to construct wholly new universes. But what if, for once, instead of staring at our screens or conjuring in our minds the visions of alternate worlds, we were truly able to step through and into them? Magic, Tempest says, is “a unique tool for pre-visualization.” Augmented reality, as well as other similarly advanced technologies, may one day be capable of achieving the hitherto impossible realities that we have only imagined in our minds.