Marvel to Integrate AR, Marvel Comics Unlimited, Audio Into Single App

Last year at South by Southwest, Marvel Comics announced that they would be bringing audio to the comics-reading experience by way of something they called "Project Gamma." This year at South by Southwest, Marvel Comics announced that they will be bringing audio to the comics-reading experience by rolling the existing Marvel AR and Marvel Comics Unlimited into a single, more functional app. It's launched with the Captain America: The Winter Soldier storyline, so odds are good the mood will be evocative of the upcoming film adapted from that tale. Yeah, that took a while to get off the ground, but they think it will be worth the wait, apparently. The feature-rich new Marvel Comics Unlimited app is 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 publisher recently announced a plan to demo the program -- which usually costs $9.99 per month or can be bought annually for a discounted rate -- for just $0.99 for the first month. In addition to the addition of adaptive audio (which follows the reading experience and plays at the pace you're reading), Marvel's AR app will also be integrated into the upgraded Digital Comics Unlimited app beginning soon. The first AR titles added to the app will reportedly be Jonathan Hickman's best-selling Avengers run, but it's likely they will not be alone for long; once that run is added to the unlimited offerings (usually, that happens between six and eighteen months after a comic's first publication but the timetable is variable), it stands to reason that other Marvel NOW! titles, which were published with AR features in print, will follow. According to the publisher, they also hope to add new videos (presumably to popular back issues) in addition to importing the 1,400 existing AR videos. This is the first time that AR features have been made available on in-app so that readers didn't have to hover a phone or tablet over whatever they were reading the comic on (or the physical comic, if they were reading that) and wait for the AR app to load. In the Marvel Comics Unlimited app, it will be a simple button in the content. Both the AR features and the adaptive audio can be disabled in the app settings. The upgraded app is not yet available on Android; Marvel told CNet that it's "so, so close," and that wouldn't be surprising if true; they've often launched iOS features first, followed by Android versions a week later or less. The wait may be a bit longer here, though, as the new app was coded in native iOS rather than HTML5.