Through the looking glasses: from locative hypertext to responsive digital storytelling

Millard, David and Taylor, Louisa (2025) Through the looking glasses: from locative hypertext to responsive digital storytelling. Zeng, Yong and Boratto, Ludovico (eds.) In HT Adjunct '25: Proceedings of the 2025 Adjunct Proceedings of the 36th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 10-14 . (doi:10.1145/3720533.3750067).

Abstract

Traditional locative hypertext is highly reliant on fixed geographic locations: this allows stories to be tailored to those locations, but heavily restricts their audience. We present a novel locative hypertext system that dynamically positions and adapts narrative content to be responsive to any environment, an effect realised through integration of a pre-written narrative model with real-time environmental and location data. Initial user evaluations show that our approach achieves the traditional benefits of locative storytelling, including heightened perceptions and emotional connections that helped users see places in a new way. At the same time, we observe increased agency and a sense of freedom, leading to participants describing the experience as lived rather than read, with their agency arising through both narrative decisions and physical movement. Our work contributes a new model for locative hypertexts: a form of responsive digital storytelling that is location-considerate, yet location-independent; one which demonstrates many of the benefits of traditional locative hypertext, but with a new aesthetic of freedom and open exploration that fosters serendipity.

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Contributors

Author: David Millard

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