13 minutes and four seconds. That’s how long it took me to
put a salt water crocodile back together… and I enjoyed every moment of it.
This week, to my delight, I discovered the wealth of interactivity National
Geographic offers on its website - and spent many a happy hour deep in research.
The crocodile happened to be the subject of a jigsaw puzzle that I found in this interactive part of the site. The games and puzzles tend to be based around the website's vast reserves of photos in what appears to be a successful bid to get users to engage more with the images - and I found myself doing just that.
Aside from jigsaws there are a handful of other enjoyable time-fillers to get involved in - including a match game in which you have to test your memory by clicking on two of the same photo and a slide puzzle that is, in my jaded opinion, very difficult indeed.
All this is, of course, lovely but the feather in Nat Geo's interactive cap must be what they've called the 'Infinite Photo'. This is essentially a photo that's made up a thousand photos, and each one of those photos is made up of a thousand photos, and each one of those is made... ahem, I'm sure you get the idea. This is a genuinely spellbinding experience and it really forces the user to see the subtleties and fine detail of these beautiful photographs.
The thing that makes this this whole section of the website so interactive though is the fact that it's the public's photos that we are engaging with rather than those of professionals. The interactive section is located in a larger area of the site called my shot. This is where the members of the site upload their photos and, if they make the cut, they'll be displayed for all to see - and even possibly transformed into a jigsaw or some other bit of interactive tomfoolery.
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