This pictorial presents Searching for Us, a pervasive tangible narrative exploring collaborative storytelling with physical avatars. Through a mixed-methods study across six sessions with 24 participants organised in pairs, the pictorial illustrates how asymmetric roles (interactor/listener) foster shared story ownership, the collective narrative agency players develop through embodied, performative engagement, despite unequal physical control. This work contributes design principles for the design of tangible narratives: embracing external control perspectives, designing asymmetric collaboration, structuring convergence moments in the experience, and supporting multiple engagement modalities. It advances understanding of social dynamics in interactive storytelling.

Achieving the feeling of enjoyment from a reading activity might be harder for consumers due to their gradual adaptation to digital media that provide fast and intense experiences.To preserve the reading tradition with the help of digital technologies, we focus on adapting fiction to virtual reality (VR).This study investigates how VR readers perceive differences between narrative absorption and presence, how their individual ability to get absorbed by narratives affects their VR reading experience, and how a visually saturated VR space influences their imagination.We conducted a mixed methods study (n = 42) using our VR reading prototype.The results show that the VR reading experience was perceived as symbiotic between the text and visuals and that the mental imagery of individual readers adapted to the visual style of the VR scene.

The Non-myth of the Noble Red is a tangible narrative that combines cardboard puppets with digital storytelling in an integrated physical storyworld. This narrative employs networked microcontrollers within the puppets, RFID readers, and sensors to enable interactivity. The narrative unfolds within three physical, interactive environments. Each environment can track the puppets' positions and trigger audio fragments of the story. Performers use these puppets to navigate the narrative, interact with objects, and engage in a battle. This project explores the potential of puppets as virtual and physical avatars, emphasising interactive and collaborative storytelling. It seeks to look at the impact of these puppets and the potential emerging social dynamics during the narrative experience. The work presented here contributes to tangible narratives by emphasising an integrated physical storyworld (instead of a mapped one) and utilising puppets as storytelling artefacts that serve as both input devices and virtual/physical avatars, promoting immersive and collaborative storytelling.

World-building is among the most relevant and challenging aspects of authoring an interactive digital narrative. These challenges can even be more significant when designing tangible interactive narratives. The author must define how and when to express the material aspects of the narrative in the real world and how artefacts can support this storytelling process. This poster introduces the creative process of world-building a tangible interactive narrative: The Non-myth of the Noble Red. In this tangible narrative, world-building is based on a Brechtian approach to explore ways in which closing the gap between performance and space can involve the user into a more active role while becoming conscious of the social implications presented in the narrative. Reaching out to principles and concepts brought from theatre and other forms of performative arts places the performative component and discourse of the narrative in the foreground of the experience. This approach can be used to identify considerations that are usually ignored in mainstream interactive experiences by prioritizing the narrative's critical discourse and exploring more artistic and experimental approaches to storytelling.

Digital tangible interfaces have been used to present or embed interactive stories for decades. While many researchers explored different ways of creating engaging interactive experiences, they focused more on the novelty of the interface and the new experience it brought for users, rather than the exploration of tangible interfaces as a language, or a medium, for storytelling. Through a visual journey of our creative explorations, this pictorial reflects upon the design and making of Letters to José, a tangible narrative built during a three-year practice-led research project. Located in the intersection of tangible interaction design and interactive storytelling, our work characterizes the relationships between the artifact, other artifacts, the body, and the space with respect to supporting the narrative experience. The outcome is an annotated visual typology of artifacts for storytelling in the context of tangible narrative, as a design category and toolbox for researchers and creators of tangible stories.