Augmented reality (AR) allows users to experience stories together in the same physical space. However, little is known about the experience of sharing AR narratives with others. Much of our current understanding is derived from multi-user VR applications, which can differ significantly in presence, social interaction, and spatial awareness from narratives and other entertainment content designed for AR head-worn displays. To understand the dynamics of multi-user, co-located, AR storytelling, we conducted an exploratory study involving three original AR narratives.
Stories
Phenomenal Things
Phenomenal Things is a comical look into the daily lives of IoT artifacts and their experiences as social beings in cyberspace. This Augmented Reality (AR) experience presents a storyworld set in the digital realm where the digital personas of IoT artifacts are engaged in activities normally invisible to humans such as information extraction, learning, talking to each other and communicating with other “things” online. In this project we investigate how to tell stories in augmented reality and how users behave towards augmented characters in space.
Sentiments
This narrative explores the complex relationships between a parent and their child. In the story, the player relives the memories of a mother and her son as recent immigrants with little resources. The story is told from the mother’s perspective, in a chronological sequence that depicts significant events in their lives. The story ends with an uplifting tone as the son discovers that he was able to help his mother. Due to the story’s emotionally-driven plot and portrayal of real-life scenarios, this work can be categorized as a drama
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Spill
This narrative generally has a mysterious tone. It places the players in the middle of an unassuming party, where they must try to uncover the host’s secrets. The players walk around to eavesdrop on the surrounding characters’ conversations in order to hear keywords required for entry to the host’s secret chamber. If a player successfully enters the secret chamber, they find a magical circle that serves as a portal to another world. Additionally, the players can interact with the virtual objects through the environment to elicit actions from the characters. This work contains situations that transcend natural laws and logic and can, therefore, be categorized as a fantasy. Unlike Phenomenal Things and Sentiments, Spill includes virtual walls to assist the players in eavesdropping on the other characters.
Publication:
- Cherelle Connor, Eric Cade Schoenborn, Sathaporn Hu, Thiago Malheiros Porcino, Cameron Moore, Derek Reilly, and Wallace S Lages. 2024. Examining Pair Dynamics in Shared, Co-located Augmented Reality Narratives. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 17, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3677386.3682091
Team: Eric Schoenborn, Esha Thomare, Cameron Moore, Sathaporn Hu, Cherelle Connor, Thiago Porcino, Derek Reilly, and Wallace Lages