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MR Narrative

Members of the AEL are engaged in a long-term initiative to explore the possibilities of the mixed-reality narratives.  These narrative experiences can be eclectic combinations of digital forms, including web-based multimedia with location-specific, location-aware, and AR applications. We are particularly interested in narratives that can be experienced on tablets and smartphones—often in the specific locations described or shown in the story.  All of these forms are part of the long tradition of local writing: this dates back to ancient inscriptions in Mesopotamia, Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, and elsewhere. The tradition continues will all sorts of writing about and in (special) places in the world. The technologies of AR and MR extend this tradition with capacity to write on the world virtually and dynamic with digital data. Our initiative embraces the historical, theoretical, and practical and performative aspects of local writing.  Present and past experiments  include:

Four Angry Men

“Four Angry Men” (FAM) evolved over the course of two years from being not only an experiment in creating dramatic AR, but to serving as the impetus for the design and development of the Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART). The initial version of the experience included fewer characters and thus was called “Three Angry Men” …

Projet: A Panorama narrative

Idea, text and images: Maria Engberg. Experience design and implementation: Maria Engberg and Jay Bolter. Voice Actor: Tess Kincaid. A woman finds herself in a village in the French countryside, reflects on her present life, and recalls her past. Projet reduces the viewer’s interaction to the barest minimum. The viewer intervenes by touching the screen …

The Ghost Club

Hank Blumenthal conceived The Ghost Club to illustrate the affordances of transmedia narrative. The narrative expresses itself in a variety of media forms including a feature-length film (The Ghost Club: Spirits Never Die, 2013), an AR game (created in collaboration with various student members of the AEL), and various forms of social media. Blumenthal is completing …

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