Academic articles
2009
"A mobile and multimedia game designed for History education was analyzed in terms of how it is designed and how it was applied as a narrative learning environment. In History education, narrative can be argued to be very useful to overcome fragmentation of the knowledge of historical characters and events, by relating these with meaningful connections of temporality and sequence (storification). In the game studied, students explore the history of Amsterdam by walking in the city, experiencing characters, buildings, and events, while using UMTS/GPS phones for communication and exchange of information."
Barbas, H. and N. Correia (2009). "The Making of an Interactive Digital Narrative -- InStory." Euromedia.
"This paper describes the problems that had to be faced during the elaboration of an interactive narrative for the Instory project (http://img.di.fct.unl.pt/InStory/) directed by Prof. Nuno Correia. The project had the goal of defining and implementing a platform for mobile and cinematic storytelling, information access, and gaming activities, in Quinta da Regaleira (World Heritage) in Sintra, Portugal. The system is driven and validated by a set of fictional threads that are centered on the exploration of physical spaces (the real world, in real time). The development of a narrative was naturally constrained by the environment which raised some practical and theoretical issues in what regards the literary strategies involved."
Frohlich, D., D. Rachovides, et al. (2009). StoryBank: mobile digital storytelling in a development context, ACM.
"Mobile imaging and digital storytelling currently support a growing practice of multimedia communication in the West. In this paper we describe a project which explores their benefit in the East, to support non-textual information sharing in an Indian village. Local audiovisual story creation and sharing activities were carried out in a one month trial, using 10 customized cameraphones and a digital library of stories represented on a village display. The findings show that the system was usable by a cross-section of the community and valued for its ability to express a mixture of development and community information in an accessible form. Lessons for the role of HCI in this context are also discussed."
Hea, A. C. K., Ed. (2009). "Going Wireless", Hampton Press.
Integration of wireless and mobile technologies on college and university campuses has steadily risen over the past seven years. The 2002 Gartner DataQuest’s campus computer survey reports that “70 percent of U.S. college campuses had some local area wireless network coverage, while 10 percent had full campus coverage” (Akin, 2003, p. 91). In addition, Comscore Networks claims that “10 million Americans surf [the Web] from cell phones and PDAs” (Ellison, 2003, p. 64). In the fall of 2001, the University of South Dakota required all entering students to purchase a Palm PDA (Akin, 2003, p. 92). Experts in mobile technologies predict that handheld devices like PDAs will become as ubiquitous in workplaces and college campuses as the desktop computer (Weiser, 1998; Chen, 1999). This migration to wireless and mobile technologies means a shift in the pedagogical and curricular spaces typically reserved for writing instruction. Going Wireless offers a mix of practical and theoretical insights on wireless and mobile technologies to rhetoric and composition teachers, scholars, and administrators.
Hjorth, L. (2009). "The big bang: An example of mobile media as new media." Computers in Entertainment (CIE) 7(2).
"In order to address the potential of mobile media as new media, I will begin by discussing some aspects of what it means to be 'mobile' in a period of globalization. I will then discuss South Korea as one of the major global leaders in mobile technologies, contextualising the socio-cultural dimensions of its techno-nationalist policy. I will then turn to the South Korean 'mobile hacker' project, called Dotplay, conducted by INP. I argue that through this type of hactivist project we can begin to reflect the art of being immobile and mobile in an age of global UCC 'flows.'"
Hudson-Smith, A. and A. Crooks (2009). "Neogeography, Gaming and Virtual Environments: Web 2.0, Mapping for the Masses and the Renaissance of Geographic Information."
Web 2.0, specifically The Cloud, GeoWeb and Wikitecture are revolutionizing the way in which we present, share and analyze geographic data. In this paper we outline and provide working examples a suite of tools which are detailed below, aimed at developing new applications of GIS and related technologies. GeoVUE is one of seven nodes in the National Centre for e-Social Science whose mission it is to develop web-based technologies for the social and geographical sciences. The Node, based at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London has developed a suite of free software allowing quick and easy visualization of geographic data in systems such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Crysis and Second Life. These tools address two issues, firstly that spatial data is still inherently difficult to share and visualize for the non-GIS trained academic or professional and secondly that a geographic data social network has the potential to dramatically open up data sources for both the public and professional geographer. With our applications of GMap Creator, and MapTube to name but two, we detail ways to intelligently visualize and share spatial data. This paper concludes with detailing usage and outreach as well as an insight into how such tools are already providing a significant impact to the outreach of geographic information.
Kenteris, M., D. Gavalas, et al. (2009). "An innovative mobile electronic tourist guide application." Personal and Ubiquitous computing 13(2): 103-118.
“'Mobile tourism' represents a relatively new trend in the field of tourism and involves the use of mobile devices as electronic tourist guides. While much of the underlying technology is already available, there are still open challenges with respect to design, usability, portability, functionality and implementation aspects. Most existing “mobile tourism” solutions either represent of-the-shelf applications with rigidly defined content or involve portable devices with networking capabilities that access tourist content with the requirement of constant airtime, i.e., continuous wireless network coverage. This paper presents the design and implementation issues of a 'mobile tourism' research prototype, which brings together the main assets of the two aforementioned approaches. Namely, it enables the creation of portable tourist applications with rich content that matches user preferences."
Reitmaier, T. and G. Marsden (2009). Bringing Digital Storytelling to the Mobile. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT, Springer.
"Technology has changed the way in which people tell their stories. This paper introduces digital storytelling and looks at why the mobile is an ideal platform for creating digital stories. The iterative design approach chosen for our Mobile Digital Storytelling system is discussed. Results of a final experiment, comparing our system to an existing mobile system that supports digital storytelling, are presented, which suggest that our system has met its design goals of providing an effective and efficient user interface. Qualitative insights from user evaluations show that mobile digital storytelling has a future."
Stein, J., S. Ruston, et al. (2009). "Location-Based Mobile Storytelling." International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction 5(1): 41-50.
"This article describes an investigation in location-based mobile storytelling entitled Tracking Agama. Using
a combination of SMS messaging, voice calls, and web log entries, Tracking Agama leads its participants
on a narrative-based exploration of Los Angeles, in pursuit of a fabled urban researcher, “Agama.” Participants use a bit of detective work to discover the keywords allowing access to Agama’s voice-activated
and phone-accessible audio diary entries; send and receive SMS messages from Agama and his assistant;
and receive calls from the virtual characters."
Tuck, D. and I. Kuksa (2009). Virtual Heritage Tours: Developing Interactive Narrative-Based Environments for Historical Sites, Springer.
"In the last decade there has been a noticeable growth in the use of virtual reality (VR) technologies for reconstructing cultural heritage sites. However, many of these virtual reconstructions evidence little of sites’ social histories. Narrating the Past is a research project that aims to re-address this issue by investigating methods for embedding social histories within cultural heritage sites and by creating narrative based virtual environments (VEs) within them. The project aims to enhance the visitor’s knowledge and understanding by developing a navigable 3D story space, in which participants are immersed. This has the potential to create a malleable virtual environment allowing the visitor to configure their own narrative paths."
2008
"The ubiquity of camera phones provides a convenient platform to develop immersive mixed-reality games. In this paper we introduce such a game which is loosely based on the popular card game 'Memory,' where players are asked to match a pair of identical cards among a set of overturned cards by revealing only two cards at a time. In our game, the players are asked to match a 'physical card,' which is an image of a scene in the real world, to a 'digital card,' which corresponds to a scene in a virtual world. The objective is to convey a mixed-reality sensation. Cards are matched with a scene identification engine which consists of multiple classifiers trained on previously collected images. We present our comprehensive overall game design, as well as implementation details and results. Additionally, we also describe how we constructed our scene identification engine and its performance."
de Souza e Silva, A. and D. M. Sutko (2008). "Playing Life and Living Play: How Hybrid Reality Games Reframe Space, Play, and the Ordinary." Critical Studies in Media Communication 25(5): 447 - 465.
"Hybrid reality games (HRGs) employ mobile technologies equipped with Internet access and location awareness to create a multiuser game space that occurs simultaneously in physical, digital, and represented spaces as denoted by the player's mobility. This essay analyzes and compares two HRGs: "I Like Frank" and "Day of the Figurines." The goal is to understand games and play as activities intrinsically and inseparably connected to our physical spaces and to our daily lives by focusing on the interconnection between play and ordinary life, game community, and player identity. The essay also interrogates how these games reconfigure and reflect current concepts of surveillance, community and anonymity in city spaces. The development of these concepts expands current research about how new Internet-connected mobile communication technologies change our experience of physical spaces by adding to them imaginary playful layers that influence player mobility through the city and promote singular types of interactions among physical, digital and represented spaces. Our analysis considers the intertwined and complex consequences of HRGs and other locative media, illustrating how such media can both normalize and provide modes of resistance to certain power relationships."
De Souza e Silva, A. (2008). "Alien Revolt (2005-2007): A Case Study of the First Location-Based Mobile Game in Brazil." Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE 27(1): 18-28.
"Location-aware technology and Internet connectivity embedded in mobile phones allow users to navigate physical spaces and be connected to other users, bringing many activities formerly performed "online" to physical hybrid spaces. Among such activities are location-based mobile games (LBMGs), which use urban spaces as the game scenario. This article is a case study of Alien Revolt (2005-2007), the first Brazilian LBMG, released in 2005 by the company Mind Corporation and the operator Oi in Rio de Janeiro. The game uses Java-enabled cell phones equipped with location awareness to transform the city into a battlefield. Following much of the Swedish game Botfighters' (2001-2005) idea, the first LBMG, Alien Revolt's goal involves virtually shooting other players within a specific radius in the city space. Alien Revolt exemplifies how cell phones strengthen users' connections to physical space, because they are used as collective communication devices, rather than personal private technologies. Moreover, when used for location-based activities, the cell phone plays the role of a location aware technology, rather than a mobile telephone used for two-way voice communication."
Haklay, M., A. Singleton, et al. (2008). "Web mapping 2.0: the Neogeography of the Geoweb." Geography Compass 2(6): 2011-2039.
"The landscape of Internet mapping technologies has changed dramatically since 2005. New techniques are being used and new terms have been invented and entered the lexicon such as: mash-ups, crowdsourcing, neogeography and geostack. A whole range of websites and communities from the commercial Google Maps to the grassroots OpenStreetMap, and applications such as Platial, also have emerged. In their totality, these new applications represent a step change in the evolution of the area of Internet geographic applications (which some have termed the GeoWeb). The nature of this change warrants an explanation and an overview, as it has implications both for geographers and the public notion of Geography. This article provides a critical review of this newly emerging landscape, starting with an introduction to the concepts, technologies and structures that have emerged over the short period of intense innovation. It introduces the non-technical reader to them, suggests reasons for the neologism, explains the terminology, and provides a perspective on the current trends. Case studies are used to demonstrate this Web Mapping 2.0 era, and differentiate it from the previous generation of Internet mapping. Finally, the implications of these new techniques and the challenges they pose to geographic information science, geography and society at large are considered."
Hight, J. (2008). "Directions in Locative Media." IEEE multimedia 15(3): 4-5.
"In 2002, Jeremy Hight was involved in the project 34 North 118 West, one of the seminal works of what became known as locative media. He also wrote one of the seminal texts of the field, Narrative Archaeology. Here he discusses the process of conceptualizing and making the work and how it has fueled his latest projects with locative narratives."
Multisilta, J. and M. Mäenpää (2008). Mobile video stories, ACM.
"The aim of this article is to test how different narrative structures work in mobile video storytelling applications for creative arts. Especially, we are interested in stories made with the mobile phone and for the mobile phone i.e. they are supposed to be viewed on the mobile phone. In addition, we present a new mobile social video service and demo platform MoViE that enables users to create mobile narrations and stories using narrative structures. Hypothesis is that it is possible to create a dramaturgically intensive and coherent story from various short mobile videos composed by several authors if only there is a story generator that composes the certain structure and order to the combination of mobile videos. User of a mobile phone with video camera works as an author, and several authors could produce a common narrative with one storyline that is composed by automatic story generator. In the empirical part of the article we apply a narrative structure based on jazz music as a matrix for the story generator and analyze the creation process of video clips. In this study, we use ethnomethodology as our research framework."
Saran, M., K. Cagiltay, et al. (2008). Use of Mobile Phones in Language Learning: Developing Effective Instructional Materials.
"With its widespread use and its features and functions such as mobility, reachability, localization, and personalization, mobile phone technology offers a great potential in learning environments. With this consideration, our first and foremost aim in this study has been to make use of this profound interest and potential, and contribute to the efforts to enhance existing educational practices, particularly in the developing regions of the world. Therefore, we developed instructional materials to be delivered through mobile phones operated in second generation GSM technology in order to improve English language learners' vocabulary acquisition. The multimedia messages in this study allowed students to see the definitions of words, example sentences, related visual representations, and pronunciations. After students finished reading multimedia messages, interactive short message service (SMS) quizzes for testing their learning were sent. This paper suggests some important points to consider while creating MMS content and a SMS quiz system for educational purposes."
Schöning, J., B. Hecht, et al. (2008). "Evaluating automatically generated location-based stories for tourists." CHI 2008.
"Tourism provides over six percent of the world's gross domestic product. As a result, there have been many efforts to use technology to improve the tourist's experience via mobile tour guide systems. One key bottleneck in such location-based systems is content development; existing systems either provide trivial information at a global scale or present quality narratives but at an extremely local scale. The primary reason for this dichotomy is that, although good narrative content is more educationally effective (and more entertaining) than a stream of simple, disconnected facts, it is time-intensive and expensive to develop. However, the WikEar system uses narrative theory-informed data mining methodologies in an effort to produce high-quality narrative content for any location on Earth. It allows tourists to interact with these narratives using their camera-enabled cell phones and an innovative interface designed around a magic lens and paper map metaphor. In this paper, we describe a first evaluation of these narratives and the WikEar interface, which reported promising, but not conclusive, results. We also present ideas for future work that will use this feedback to improve the narratives."
Wei, R. (2008). "Motivations for using the mobile phone for mass communications and entertainment." Telematics and Informatics 25(1): 36-46.
"This study draws on the uses and gratifications framework to examine expanded use of a hybrid medium—the mobile phone—for mass communications and entertainment. Results of a telephone survey of 208 users show different motivations predict diverse uses of the mobile phone. Instrumental use motives drive the use of the mobile phone for news-seeking and Web-surfing. Further, the motive of pass time is significantly linked to playing video games via the mobile phone. In addition, the high-tech mobile phone enabled users to be more active: the more intensively people use mobile phones for voice calls, the more likely they will be to use mobile data services. Thus, the hybrid mobile phone bridges interpersonal and mass communication. Finally, younger users are more likely to use mobile phones for getting news and entertainment. Implications for the industry and recommendations for future research are discussed."
2007
"AR promises to transform the way we perceive our world, much as hyperlinks and browsers have
already begun to change the way we read. Today we can click on hyperlinks in text to open new vistas of print, audio, and video media. A decade from now—if the technical problems can be solved—we will be able to use marked objects in our physical environment to guide us through rich, vivid, and gripping worlds of
historical information and experience."
Bruns, E., B. Brombach, et al. (2007). "Enabling mobile phones to support large-scale museum guidance." IEEE multimedia 14(2): 16.
"Mobile phones have the potential of becoming a future platform for personal museum guidance. They enable full multimedia presentations and—assuming that the visitors are using their own devices—will significantly reduce acquisition and maintenance costs for museum operators. However, several technological challenges
must be mastered before this concept is successful. One is the question of how individual museum objects can be intuitively identified before presenting corresponding information."
Flintham, M., G. Giannachi, et al. (2007). "Day of the Figurines: Supporting Episodic Storytelling on Mobile Phones." Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4871: 167.
"Day of the Figurines (DoF) is a pervasive game for mobile phones that uses text messaging. DoF is driven by a strong scripted narrative that is combined with various interactive elements to create a shared experience. It is also a slow game, unfolding over twenty four days of its players’ lives, requiring them to send and receive only a few messages each day. Our experience of staging multiple performances of DoF to more than seven hundred players revealed key issues concerning the design and experience of time in such a pervasive game. Most players engaged episodically, raising issues of how to manage reengagement with the game and sustain social relationships. Our experience has led us to propose a framework for how to design time in shared interactive narratives in which five distinct layers of time – story time, plot time, schedule time, interaction time and perceived time – are mapped onto one another."
Jacucci, G., A. Oulasvirta, et al. (2007). "Active construction of experience through mobile media: a field study with implications for recording and sharing." Personal & Ubiquitous Computing 11(4): 215-234.
"To fully appreciate the opportunities provided by interactive and ubiquitous multimedia to record and share experiences, we report on an ethnographic investigation on the settings and nature of human memory and experience at a large-scale event. We studied two groups of spectators at a FIA World Rally Championship in Finland, both equipped with multimedia mobile phones. Our analysis of the organization of experience-related activities in the mass event focuses on the active role of technology-mediated memories in constructing experiences. Continuity, reflexivity with regard to the Self and the group, maintaining and re-creating group identity, protagonism and active spectatorship were important social aspects of the experience and were directly reflected in how multimedia was used. Particularly, we witnessed multimedia-mediated forms of expression, such as staging, competition, storytelling, joking, communicating presence, and portraying others; and the motivation for these stemmed from the engaging, processual, and shared nature of experience. Moreover, we observed how temporality and spatiality provided a platform for constructing experiences. The analysis advocates applications that not only store or capture human experience for sharing or later use but also actively participates in the very construction of experience. The approach conveys several valuable design implications."
Lim, M. and R. Aylett (2007). "Narrative construction in a mobile tour guide." Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4871: 51.
"Storytelling capabilities are vital aspect(s) of a tour guide. In this paper, we present a mobile tour guide that emulates a real guide’s behaviour by presenting stories based on the user’s interests, its own interests, its belief and its current memory activation. This research moves away from the concept of a guide that recites facts about places or events towards a guide that utilises improvisational storytelling techniques. Contrasting views and personality are achieved with an inclusion of emotional memories containing the guide’s ideology and its past experiences."
Novey, L. and T. Hall (2007). "The effect of audio tours on learning and social interaction: An evaluation at Carlsbad Caverns National Park." Science Education 91(2): 260-277.
"Auditory forms of nonpersonal communication have rarely been evaluated in informal settings like parks and museums. This study evaluated the effect of an interpretive audio tour on visitor knowledge and social behavior at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. A cross-sectional pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design compared the responses of audio tour users (n=123) and nonusers (n=131) on several knowledge questions. Observations (n=700) conducted at seven sites within the caverns documented sign reading, time spent
listening to the audio, within group conversation, and other social behaviors for a different sample of visitors. Pretested tour users and nonusers did not differ in visitor characteristics knowledge, or attitude variables, suggesting the two populations were similar. On a 12-item knowledge quiz, tour users’ scores increased from 5.7 to 10.3, and nonusers’ scores increased from 6.2 to 8.4. Most visitors were able to identify some of the park’s major messages when presented with a multiple-choice question, but more audio users than
nonusers identified resource preservation as a primary message in an open-ended question."
Roden, T., I. Parberry, et al. (2007). "Toward mobile entertainment: A paradigm for narrative-based audio only games." Science of Computer Programming 67(1): 76-90.
"The widespread use of sophisticated mobile computing devices has set the stage for a renaissance in audio only entertainment. Traditional visual games are already used widely in cellular phones and similar devices. A significant limitation is the small display size. In contrast, audio only games on suitable mobile hardware need not degrade due to the smaller form factor. This makes audio only games an attractive alternative to visual games. We describe a framework for authoring interactive narrative-based audio only games set in 3D virtual environments. Despite the novelty in audio only gaming, our approach builds on a foundation of several years of research into audio only applications for sight impaired users, augmented reality systems and human–computer interaction studies. In comparison to attempts to provide a realistic user interface, we argue a simple interface enhances both immersion and entertainment value, serendipitously making audio only games practical for mobile computing. Novel features of our system include real-time gameplay and multi-player support. We also describe our software architecture, the current implementation of which uses low-cost existing PC-based hardware and software. In addition, we describe our first game, Dragon’s Roar."
2006
"Location appears to be one of the most important aspects of context in mobile communication. It is a complex piece of information involving several levels of detail. Location intertwines with other relevant aspects of context: the parties’ present activity, relative time and identities. The analysis of mobile conversations provides insights into the functions of “location” for mobile users. Most mobile calls involve a sequence in which location is reported. Location is made relevant by the parties’ activities. Location telling takes place in five different activity contexts during mobile calls. Location may be an index of interactional availability, a precursor for mutual activity, part of an ongoing activity, or it may bear emergent relevance for the activity or be presented as a social fact. Typically, joint activities make relevant spatio-temporal location such as distance in minutes from the meeting point via the vehicle used. For users, location does not appear to be relevant in purely geographical terms."
Epstein, Michael and Vergani, Silvia, "Mobile Technologies and Creative Tourism : The History Unwired Pilot Project in Venice Italy" (2006). AMCIS 2006 Proceedings.Paper 178.
"The aim of this paper is to present a pilot mobile technology walking tour created in Venice, Italy within the context of creative tourism. The paper will focus primarily on the workings and user studies of the History Unwired (HU, see http://web.mit.edu/frontiers) project in Venice, Italy and pull in some authenticity research and other projects related to mobile technology in the tourism sector. From the outset, we recognize the potential incompatibility between the natural, palpable beauty of Venice and cutting edge mobile technology. We examine mobile media as a means of creating interactions between tourists and locals and as a means of activiting travelers as co-producers of travel experiences. This paper is being written at a time in which mobile technology content development is in its infancy, and bound to evolve in many directions, especially in the tourism industry."
van Sinderen, M. J., A. T. van Halteren, et al. (2006). "Supporting Context-Aware Mobile Applications: An Infrastructure Approach." IEEE Communications Magazine 44(9): 96-104.
"Mobile phones and PDAs are converging into mobile lifestyle devices that offer a wide range of applications to end users. Many of these applications will have the ability to adapt themselves to the user’s situation, commonly referred to as context awareness. We argue that an infrastructure is needed to enable wide deployment of context-aware applications. A major benefit is interoperability between heterogeneous context
sources and applications in a privacy-sensitive way."
2005
"Emerging technologies such as location-awareness devices have the potential to significantly impact users' social coordination, particularly while rendezvousing. It is important that we explore how new technologies influence social behaviours and communication in order to realize their full potential. This paper presents a field study investigating the use of mobile location-aware devices for rendezvous activities. Participants took part in one of three mobile device conditions (a mobile phone, a location-aware handheld, or both a mobile phone and a location-aware handheld) and completed three rendezvousing scenarios. The results reveal key differences in communication patterns between the mediums, as well as the potential strengths and limitations of location-aware devices for social coordination. The paper concludes with a discussion of relevant design issues drawn from observations gathered during the field study."
2004
"Location awareness is a key ingredient to many applications of mobile devices. Devices with the ability to determine their own position in space can retrieve, filter, or present information depending on this position. There are, however, different ways to look at this situation resulting in different distributions of computational resources. A strongly simplified description model will be introduced and a number of existing systems, from both research and industry, will be analyzed according to this model. With a view to scalability in ubiquitous computing worlds, we will examine the tradeoffs with respect to putting more computational effort and design wits into the environment and infrastructure or into the actual mobile device. Some of the ideas presented here were discussed in a paper at the first workshop on artificial intelligence (AI) in mobile devices."
Hazas, M., J. Scott, et al. (2004). "Location-aware computing comes of age." Computer 37(2): 95-97.
"At the core of invisible computing is context awareness, the concept of sensing and reacting to dynamic environments and activities. Location is a crucial component of context, and much research in the past decade has focused on location-sensing technologies, location-aware application support, and location-based applications. With numerous factors driving deployment of sensing technologies, location-aware computing may soon become a part of everyday life."
Schmandt, C. and N. Marmasse (2004). "User-Centered Location Awareness." Computer 37(10): 110-111.
"Nowadays, mobile computing and communication devices provide access to information from nearly anywhere, and many of these devices know where they are. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission requires that 95 percent of mobile phones must be able to determine their location within 50 to 300 meters by the end of 2005, and that wireless carriers must make this information available to emergency call responders. Much current research focuses on using location awareness to provide information about a user's surroundings. It is believed that geographic information can be personalized based on its relevance to the user, with appropriate descriptions or granularity to deliver valuable location-aware services. To demonstrate the practicality of this approach, several prototype applications are implemented in mobile phones that combine location awareness with communication technology."
2003
"We describe the several possibilities of using storytelling in an Augmented Reality Environment to support the collaborative experience of the users in those environments. We start with the motivation of a lack of storytelling and experience in Collaborative Virtual Environments. As an implication of the need for such experiences, we give a general definition of Interactive Storytelling and offer some insights on the difference between Interactive Stories and Games. We introduce our approach to Interactive Storytelling as a combination of Audience Participatory Theatre and a morphological approach to storytelling in Augmented Reality Environments. An overview of the technical development of the approach is followed by a project description, using the stated approach to verify the useful application of the approach in regard to collaborative user experiences."
Hight, J. (2003). "Narrative Archeology." Xcp: Streetnotes.
"The project '34 North 118 West' utilizes technology and the physical navigation of a city simultaneously to forge a new construct. The narrative is embedded in the city itself as well as the city is read. The story world becomes one of juxtaposition, of overlap, of layers appearing and falling away. Place becomes a multi-tiered and malleable concept beyond that of setting and detail to establish a fictive place, a narrative world. The effect is a text and sound based virtual reality, a non passive movement, a being in two places at once with eyes open."
MacIntyre, B. and J. Bolter (2003). "Single-narrative, multiple point-of-view dramatic experiences in augmented reality." Virtual Reality 7(1): 10-16.
"Researchers and practitioners working on story-based experiences in virtual environments often make two assumptions. One assumption is that, to be compelling, such experiences must enable the user to make significant choices that alter the outcome of the story. Another is that virtual environments constitute a revolutionary new medium, and therefore that the techniques of earlier media, such as film and stage production, are no longer relevant. In designing story-based experiences in augmented reality, we have come to question these two assumptions. Three Angry Men, based on the teleplay and movie Twelve Angry Men, is an example of an augmented reality, dramatic experience with a fixed plot but multiple points of view. "
Mankins, M.W.D. (2003). "Location Linked Information."
M.I.T. master's thesis on "location linked information," with complementary information here.
Gruteser, M. and D. Grunwald (2003). Anonymous usage of location-based services through spatial and temporal cloaking, ACM New York, NY, USA.
"Advances in sensing and tracking technology enable location-based applications but they also create significant privacy risks. Anonymity can provide a high degree of privacy, save service users from dealing with service providers’ privacy policies, and reduce the service providers’ requirements for safeguarding private information. However, guaranteeing anonymous usage of location-based services requires that the precise location information transmitted by a user cannot be easily used to re-identify the subject. This paper presents a middleware architecture and algorithms that can be used by a centralized location broker service. The adaptive algorithms adjust the resolution of location information along spatial or temporal dimensions to meet specified anonymity constraints based on the entities who may be using location services within a given area. Using a model based on automotive traffic counts and cartographic material, we estimate the realistically expected spatial resolution for different anonymity constraints. The median resolution generated by our algorithms is 125 meters. Thus, anonymous location-based requests for urban areas would have the same accuracy currently needed for E-911 services; this would provide sufficient resolution for wayfinding, automated bus routing services and similar location-dependent services."
2001
"Alice’s Adventures in New Media is an Augmented Reality (AR) experience based on A Mad Tea Party, a
chapter from Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The user assumes the role of Alice and
sits at the tea party with three interactive characters: the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, and the March Hare.
The video-based characters are presented through a head-mounted display, and appear to be seated at the
same physical table as the user. As a developing medium, AR has yet to establish itself as a narrative form. By comparing the unique characteristics of AR with established media, the project explores AR as a storytelling medium. Innovations include the refashioning of older media (such as film) for the development of an AR narrative, the use of simple procedural characters to create an immersive interactive experience, and the development of tools that enable the production of AR experiences."
Prasad, M. (2001). "Location based services." GIS Development Net Web Site, http://www.gisdevelopment. net/application/LBS/LBS002.htm.
"The extent of horizontal coverage of LBS has virtually covered all the walks of life from selecting the
restaurants to emergency services to aid in navigation Location Based Service or LBS, is the ability to find the geographical location of the mobile device and provide services based on this location information. For an example a person at shopping mall calls for the nearest restaurant with economy budget, he needs only names and addresses of those restaurants which are within his reach, say within one sq.km., out of the database of say 2000 restaurants in the city spread over 1600 sq.km. The foundation stone of Location Based Services was laid by the Federal Communications Commission of US (www.fcc.gov) ruling which required the network operators to provide emergency services by locating the user of the mobile device within 125 metres. It required wireless network operators to supply public emergency services with the caller’s location and callback phone number. This lastened the emergence of new and dynamic field called LBS, where the service was based on the geographical location of the calling device. Further, the developments in the field of Positioning Systems, Communications and GIS, fueled the imagination of the industry people with regards to the LBS. This ability to provide the user a customised service depending upon his geographical location could be used by telecommunication companies to restaurant owners. In the days to come, the LBS will be benefiting both the consumers and network operators. While the consumers will have greater personal safety, more personalised features and increased communication convenience, the network operators will address discrete market segments based on the different service portfolios."
