Story CreatAR: a spatial analysis tool for space-adaptive story content placement

Abstract

Immersive locative augmented reality (AR) provides rich storytelling possibilities. When authors place content in a locative AR narrative, they must consider the relationships between the environment, the player’s perspective, and story events. This becomes challenging and time-consuming when designing for many or unknown locations. We present Story CreatAR, a locative authoring tool that uses spatial analysis techniques to facilitate multi-site deployment. Story CreatAR was iteratively designed to help authors consider, test, and adjust spatial relationships in their story. We evaluated Story CreatAR in several ways: authors used Story CreatAR with a graph representation of their story and with a script, and developers did the same. Through a thematic analysis of user comments and behaviour we find authors had difficulty understanding spatial analysis concepts and thinking abstractly about placement across multiple sites. However, Story CreatAR encouraged authors to consider how environments impact their stories, and authors desired additional spatial analysis features.