Al-Barrah رواية البرَّاح
Al-Barrah البــــرَّاح
The First Arabic AR and Hologram Novel
The novel “Al-Barrah – The announcer” is a collaborative, immersive, and digital project between the programmer Mohamed Nassef and myself. “Al-Barrah” is the first paper novel to combine augmented reality and hologram technologies with Arabic language text inside the borders of a paper page to provide the reader with a unique experience, and immerse her in the narrative.
The novel is divided into two parts, each part narrates a different story from the other part. The first story discusses the after Arab Spring situation in the Arab World and the second one imagines how the lost continent of Atlantis was destroyed in a day and night. Each part can be read in the opposite direction of the other part so, the reader will flip the book upside down in order to read the other part, thus the novel can be read from both sides, and in a reverse way.
The first story happens in contemporary times, while the second story goes back to ancient times, and the world of legends. The two stories converge in the middle of the book, and the reader will be able to create links between the two stories and understand their connotations.
The reader will download an AR application, designed especially for the novel of Al-Barrah, on her smart device, opens the application, and then directs the camera of the device above the image. The digital content starts to come out, which is written in Arabic, English, and in Heiroglyphic in some parts of the novel.
The hologram technology is used in the second story to project the light of a hologram video inside a plastic pyramid, which the reader will create by herself. The reader will watch the book of Osiris goes around inside the pyramid and some shapes like ancient statues and modern inventions get out of the book, here the reader gets the connotation of this scene and understands that the book of Osiris will tell her about the news of the ancient age and the future age.
Al-Barrah has been featured and discussed in different conferences and symposiums.
On June 20, 2019, I participated in the conference Languages Inter Networks, organized by Lancaster University, UK. I presented a paper under the title “Languages of AR Narration: Arabic Perspectives,” in which I discussed Al-Barrah with practical examples for the first time.
I discussed Al-Barrah for the first time in the Arab World in a paper entitled “To bring the World inside the Borders of the White Page: Interactivity in the Augmented Reality and Hologram Novel Al-Barrah,” in the16th Edition of Sharjah Narrative Forum in Amman, Jordan, Sept. 18, 2019.
Then, Al-Barrah traveled back to the UK in a guest lecture, that I delivered in Leeds Library on Sept. 23, 2019, under the title “Re-thinking Literature in the Digital Age.”
This is a recap of my presentation of the Novel ‘Al-Barrah’ in the American University in Cairo on Oct. 13, 2019. My paper “AI as a Narrative Technique: Perspectives on the First Arabic AR and Hologram Novel .” was presented in a workshop organized by Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, the University of Cambridge and the Access to Knowledge for Development Center, American University in Cairo.
Al-Barrah YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHhUlU69gIGTDzfcYT9138A
