user-created mobile narratives

​Designing interactive narratives for mobile augmented reality

This paper outlines audience research of early prototypes for mobile AR narrative games where users were invited to co-create a location based narrative using AR.

Noting that real world objects can stimulate user's imagination, the designer's created a system to encourage user's to create their own stories in relation to real sites.  Design guidelines included
1) menu minimisation, enabling users to jump directly into stories
2) carefully constrained user freedom
3) choice of interaction metaphors to support cross-space flow
4) encouraging joy by emphasising playful discovery

DISCOVERY
- In this mobile AR game design users could explore and uncover hidden parts of the story at random through their phone, which is utilized like a window to the physical world, enabling the discovery of narrativised AR objects.
- Only portions of the AR world can be viewed at any one time, forcing the user to construct the overall puzzle pieces in their head.
- Users werealso given the option to create their own stories by writing tags for these location linked AR objects.
- These tags could be shared and modified by other users in turn.

Following these principles the designers created 3 protoptypes
1) In the 1st prototype users could discover AR objects through a scrubbing and dusting action to mimic cleaning that also involved physical mobile vibrations whenever the phone is shaken to 'clean' the AR dirt.
2) The 2nd prototype involved users catching AR fish in prototype augmented ponds. Different ponds and fish were linked to different corresponding words and sentences, which users strung together through the act of fishing.  The image on the mobile viewfinder is simultaneously projected on a nearby large display. 
3) Users play with augmented comic strip graphics on the wall, adding their own captions and tags.

Results:
- Users regarded the 3rd prototype as the most interactive in terms of narrative creation
- The narrative interactivity of the 2nd prototype was less understood.
- Prototype 1 was regarded as the most playful  Even middle-aged users enjoying scrubbing themselves, despite weak flow between physical and virtual realms because participants only focused on dirt-scrubbing activity once the virtual body appeared on the mobile screen.

Nam, Y., 2015. Designing interactive narratives for mobile augmented reality. Cluster Computing, 18(1), pp.309-320.



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