Supporting Spatial Thinking in Augmented Reality Narrative: A Field Study

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.