DAWN TO DUSK NEWS: Marvel's ready for you to hear its comics (scoop)

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Finally, Marvel's ready for you to hear its comics (scoop)</h1>
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Marvel
 upgrades its subscription app with a long-promised smart soundtrack and
 DVD-style video commentary, after spending a year laying the foundation
 for a more multimedia-friendly comics reading experience.</div>
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Starting with the popular story Captain 
AmericaL The Winter Soldier, Marvel is adding "adaptive audio" to some 
of its digital comics.</div>
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Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
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It's a fallacy of the superhero genre that a new costume accompanies 
every power boost the hero earns. That's also the case with a major 
upgrade to Marvel Unlimited, the preferred (and only) subscription-based
 comics reading app for fans of Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Captain 
America.
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Scheduled to be announced on Sunday afternoon's Marvel panel at
 South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, and currently live in Apple's
 iTunes Store, the new version of Marvel Unlimited
 looks a lot like the old version of Marvel Unlimited. Don't let that 
fool you, though, as the changes could present a way forward for smarter
 integration between traditional comics and multimedia features.
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A year in the making, the new version of the app comes with three 
important changes: transitions from one panel to the next are faster and
 smoother, there's now adaptive audio, and Marvel AR's DVD-style extras 
are now included in its digital comics for the first time.
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While the added features might turn off more traditionalist comics 
readers, Kristin Vincent, Marvel's vice president of digital products, 
said that the goal was to make digital comics feel more digital without 
losing their essential nature.
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"We knew we had something conceptually," she said of last year's adaptive audio announcement by Marvel at SXSW, "but we weren't sure how it was going to work with comics. We wanted to figure out how we could tell stories in new ways."
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Arune Singh, executive director of TV Communications at Marvel, 
described the change as one that could alter how the company makes its 
comics available electronically.
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"The way we used to paste comics together on the page in production, so far we have been pasting comics on our
 iPad," he said. "Now, we have adaptive audio."
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The features can also be disabled in the Options panel. Because Marvel 
Unlimited is a subscription-based app, the features have been added at 
no extra cost. To entice new readers, Marvel has dropped the cost of 
subscribing for the first month to $0.99, if you sign up by March 14 
with the promo code SXSW99. Normally and thereafter, Marvel Unlimited 
costs $9.99 per month, or $69.99 per year.
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The DVD-extras added commentary of Marvel AR videos now comes to Marvel's digital comics.</div>
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The overhaul to the comics reader has swapped out HTML5 for native iOS 
code, so page turning and panel transitions are smoother. The update to 
the Android app is "so, so close," Vincent said. Both were done as 
work-for-hire by Chaotic Moon, Marvel's long-standing partner on Marvel 
Unlimited.
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The big new feature, though, is that Marvel is finally making available 
to its readers what it calls "adaptive audio." It's similar to a 
background soundtrack or movie score, but it detects when you move from 
one panel to the next and plays themed music appropriate to each panel. 
It can also gauge how quickly the reader is changing panels and will 
adapt the score to suit the pace of the reader, says Marvel.
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The music plays from when the comic loads, starting with the book's 
cover, and then adding in adaptive elements such as the pinging sonar of
 a submarine when viewing a panel of a submarine and mines. <br />

The adaptive audio, which is only available on Captain America: The 
Winter Soldier storyline at first, probably owing to the extra time 
required to create the score for each comic. Vincent said that other 
comics will be added, but added that Marvel wants to hear from its fans 
on what they think of the debut.
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More traditional fans can disable the new features through the options panel.</div>
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"I think we have the best fans in the world, and the most vocal fans in 
the world. We're always watching the metrics," she said. "We look for 
what people are sharing in the social space. We're very in tune with our
 fans, or at least try to be, and move where they move."
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Marvel's previous partners on the adaptive audio, CORD and Momentum, are
 no longer working on the project. In their place, Marvel has signed on 
Melbourne, Australia-based Firelight Technologies' FMOD, which also is 
used in video games such as Crysis, Bioshock and Guitar Hero, and 
contracted with Emmy-nominated composer David Ari Leon's SoundMind 
Music. SoundMind is no stranger to Marvel, having also worked on Marvel 
cartoons and motion comics.
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Marvel AR, or augmented reality, videos have been available previously 
only to people who bought the printed comic. You would then have to hold
 your phone or tablet over an AR-enabled panel to activate the video, 
and it would show you a behind-the-scenes look at the comic, often 
interviews with writers or artists, or the process of developing the 
page. <br />

Marvel has begun integrating that AR content into Marvel Unlimited with 
20 videos related to the first issue of author Jonathan Hickman's 
Avengers series from 2012. The company plans to move its current 1,400 
videos to Marvel Unlimited, Vincent said, as well as adding new videos.
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Finally, Marvel's ready for you to hear its comics (scoop)

Finally, Marvel's ready for you to hear its comics (scoop) Marvel upgrades its subscription app with a long-promised smart soundtr...