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Supporting Spatial Thinking in Augmented Reality Narrative: A Field Study

This work is an evaluation of the StoryCreatAR tool kit with real authors, real narratives, and results from deploying that narrative as a public installation.

Publication Details

This chapter is featured in ‘Interactive Storytelling (2022)‘

Summary

This paper follows up on our earlier work on StoryCreatAR by presenting an evaluation of the tool kit by having real authors create real stories and deploying them for a public installation. We discuss our thematic analysis which informed how actual authors thought about immersive narratives and how StoryCreatAR helped or hindered their work flow.

Authors

Abbey Singh, Matthew Peachey, Ramanpreet Kaur, Peter Haltner, Shannon Frederick, Mohammed Alnusayri, David Choco Manco, Colton Morris, Shannon Brownlee, Joseph Malloch, Derek Reilly

Abstract

Immersive augmented reality (AR) is an exciting medium for locative narrative. Immersive AR experiences are largely custom-made and site-specific, however: we lack generic tools that help authors consider interactions between physical layout, viewer perspective, and story progression, for specific sites or for locations unknown to the author. In this paper we evaluate Story CreatAR, a tool that incorporates spatial analysis techniques used in architecture, planning, and social sciences to help authors construct and deploy immersive AR narratives. We worked with three authors over several months, moving from script writing and story graph creation to deployment using the tool. We conduct a thematic analysis of each author’s actions, comments, generated artifacts, and interview responses. Authors faced a steep learning curve, sometimes misinterpreting spatial properties, and found it difficult to consider multi-site deployment. Despite these challenges, Story CreatAR helped authors consider the impact of layout on their stories in ways their scripts and graphs did not, and authors identified several additional areas for spatial analysis support, suggesting that tools like Story CreatAR are a promising direction for producing immersive AR narratives. Reflecting on author experiences, we identify a number of features that such tools should provide.

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