14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Live Labs serves as an incubator for a variety of projects from Photosynth to the Web Sandbox, and even Thumbtack, Seadragon, and Social Streams. At the same time, the group also fosters what it has referred to as a funky side project, labeled Infinite Canvas, now in Alpha stage. Designed to take comic books into the Web 2.0 universe by breaking the limits associated with page real estate space, Infinite Canvas is live and offering a consistent selection of content for set up to permit users to experience comic books on an infinite canvas.
“Infinite Canvas, a new way of looking at comics on the web developed by Live Labs' own Ian Gilman has started getting some attention lately. Infinite Canvas is a JavaScript application that frees visual storytelling from the usual comic format of squares on a page. It started to take off when Neil Gaiman tweeted about a piece he put up called “The Day The Saucers Came.” Now we’re starting to get comments like: 'I’ve just seen the future of how to present comics online;' 'Loved the story. Absolutely awed by the format;' 'If this catches on it could be very cool,'” a Microsoft Live labs team representative said.
Ian Gilman, from the Seadragon group at Microsoft Live Labs, indicated that Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics provided the inspiration for building an online space dedicated to comic books that would shed the limits associated with paper pages. In fact, the moniker Infinite Canvas was coined by McCloud.
“For the most recent Live Labs Out of the Box Week, I built a comic creator/viewer and called it Infinite Canvas. It’s all JavaScript (not Seadragon Ajax, but similar), even on the server side, where I’m using AppJet. Some early adopters have already created comics in it, so come check it out, and tell your comic friends about it,” Gilman said.