Through the Looking Glasses: From Locative Hypertext to Responsive Digital Storytelling

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.