Augmented Reality Storyworlds: Building Spatial Hyperfictions in the York Future Cinema Lab

What constitutes compelling and meaningful literary content in augmented reality environments? For this presentation I'd like to give an overview of how we are trying to answer that question in the Augmented Reality Lab (part of the Future Cinema lab, Dept. of Film) at York University. The lab is equipped with Intersense IS-900 and IS-1200 trackers, optical and video see-through diplays and we use a variety of software solutions—chiefly DART—the Designers Augmented Reality Toolkit (DART) developed by Jay Bolter and the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Lab (GVU) at the Georgia Institute of Technology but also AR Studio, and a unique MAX/MSP interface to AR Toolkit that we're building ourselves. Students in the lab also work to build stories using RFID tags and with more traditional hypermedia work on fogscreen. The core emphasis in the lab, though, is on the kind of stories that might work for these new screens and environments.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)