A Toolkit for Authoring Non-linear Storytelling Environments Using Mixed Reality

Abstract

Efficient creation of high-quality Mixed Reality (MR) content is challenging today due to a variety of difficult problems not only on a technological level. As a consequence, authoring problems prevent a more widespread usage of MR in digital storytelling. We present a novel authoring toolkit that allows an efficient integration of MR technology in various interactive non-linear storytelling applications. We demonstrate its usage in an example use case that represents typical MR-related authoring tasks like the calibration of real and virtual objects or the specification of their semantic relationship. As a peculiarity, a seamless provision of the MR authoring toolkit together with the storytelling application is conceptually and technically supported. Thus, we show how authors, even without technical background, who want to create MR-enriched storytelling experiences, can be adequately supported. The underlying concepts for an efficient implementation of our proposed authoring toolkit are briefly described.