Digital Media has come a long way since its initial conception. The world is now moving into virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. With technologies such as the Oculus Rift coming into the public market, the digital media is on the brink of plunging into a whole new era. While the Oculus Rift is a new technology that allows a user to delve into a completely virtual reality, there is another technology that we have had for years that allow for what is known as augmented reality.
Augmented reality allows the use of real-world objects and locations to stimulate the peoples’ imagination and contribute to the formation of a story (Nam 2015). This allows for new ways of digital literacy that until now have not been possible. It is a branch of literacy that is constantly evolving as the digital world expands with new possibilities and technologies.
Augmented Reality is able to be used with the smartphone. An everyday technological tool that is extremely widely used. The issue with augmented reality as a narrative tool is that previous works have mainly stayed within the area of the development of computer vision or graphics techniques or as an interactive story simulation environment that has been pre-coded stories (Nam 2015). This limits the ability of the tool for narrative to developers or designers.
Nam conducted a study using currently available technology to create software that could be used with everyday smartphones to allow the users to create their own narratives through the usage of the software rather having to explore a pre-coded narrative. Three prototypes were created for the study. The first design allowed the user to ‘explore and uncover a hidden part of the story which is pre-determined but not discovered yet so that the content appears and augments real world in any personalized order, (Nam 2015)’ thus creating their own narrative. The second allowed the user to ‘visit different physical location or to catch virtual objects from real space by chance they are able to manipulate variations and generate different versions of the story.’ (Nam 2015). The third design allowed users to create a comic strip by using real world objects.
The empirical data from the study and the user observations showed that the proposed Augmented Reality storytelling allowed the user to effectively involve the location as a storytelling experience while embracing physical objects as their story elements (Nam 2015). This shows the ability of Augmented reality as a narrative tool.
Following this study in 2015, a game was produced in 2016 by Niantic and published by The Pokémon Company using techniques similar to that of second design in the study. Pokémon Go allowed the users to visit different locations to catch a variety of Pokémon on their smartphones. The experience of each user is unique as they are able to tell their own narratives with the software. The interactions of the virtual reality combined with the real world objects and other users create unique narratives that haven’t been pre-determined in any way.
References
Nam. Y., 2015, ‘Designing interactive narratives for mobile augmented reality,’ Cluster Computing, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 309-320.
The Pokémon Company, 2016, Pokémon Go,’ viewed 28 August 2016, <http://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-video-games/pokemon-go/>
Digital Literacy 