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Exploring Collaborative Storytelling Through Performative Avatars in Searching for Us: A Tangible Pervasive Narrative

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Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2024)

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Abstract

This paper introduces Searching for Us, a tangible pervasive narrative experience that explores collaborative storytelling dynamics through marionette-like avatars, developed through a Research through Design approach. Pairs of users navigate an urban environment, embodying the characters of Hachi, a stray dog, and Buro, his human companion. The system seamlessly integrates real-time environmental data, geolocation, and user interactions to dynamically adapt the narrative. The technical framework of this experience combines physical props, gesture-recognizing avatars, and a responsive computational system, working together to interpret user actions and environmental contexts, translating them into meaningful narrative elements. The narrative structure balances linear progression with user agency, allowing a personalized yet coherent storytelling experience that responds to the immediate physical context. Searching for Us emphasizes embodied presence, co-performance, and shared narrative responsibility by blending physical interaction with digital storytelling. This work contributes to the field of interactive storytelling by demonstrating how tangible interfaces and mixed-reality environments can create compelling narrative experiences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The relationship between time and distance relates to a regular walking speed. However, further tests will help us refine the best distance range between points to keep the players engaged and the narrative flowing.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks the Department of Visual Computing of the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University for the resources and support in developing this work.

Disclosure of Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article. This paper used GPT-based language models for spelling, editing, and language refinement, exclusively to improve clarity of the existing content. No additional content was generated by such systems. All images, diagrams, ideas, arguments, analyses, and conclusions presented are the original work of the authors.

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  1. Dept. of Visual Computing, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Daniel Echeverri

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    John T. Murray

  2. Universidad del Norte, Atlántico, Colombia

    María Cecilia Reyes

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Echeverri, D. (2025). Exploring Collaborative Storytelling Through Performative Avatars in Searching for Us: A Tangible Pervasive Narrative. In: Murray, J.T., Reyes, M.C. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15467. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78453-8_8

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