The problem today with web videos is they are quite static, there is no interaction between the content and the viewers. However a new Microsoft Research project, Digital Narratives has gone some way to addresses this.

Upon first viewing it appears to just be an ordinary video however what you are actually looking at is a fully interactive video. Users can zoom into images, including panoramas, explore maps toggling the map overlays as they like and there are even videos embedded within the video that can be clicked on and viewed. Obviously to achieve all this the main video is paused but simply clicking the play button returns the screen to the content when the interaction started and resumes playing like an ordinary video.

There appears to be some clever audio effects too such as the sound of water playing when interacting with a panorama of a mountainous region.

But even more than that the various parts of the video such as the types of images and their content can be categorised and then when clicking the “outline” button the user is presented with a Zune like experience for browsing these categories.

A few other options are the ability to share the Digital Narrative from within the player whilst watching it.

I have to say this is a great project and I hope they release it to market soon, I know I could make use of this straight away for some of the holidays, my Eurotrip would be a great example. You really should check it out at http://wdh.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx and it was a good find by @pradeepviswav.