Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of authoring an environmentally-responsive narrative which is embedded throughout a wild space. Through research at the Media Lab Europe (MLE) we investigate how mobile digital stories may provide a rich experience of a place. An appropriate narrative framework evolved during our development of a prototype navigation ad storytelling system. Our audience wanders across a remote outdoor landscape gathering location and weather-based multimedia scenes that aim to amplify a rich remote setting rather than compete with it. We seek to provide a coherent cumulative story experience tat enable character development, narrative climax, and a singular conclusion to everyone regardless of their strategy for navigating the story space. With these goals as a guide we develop a simple, generalizeable framework for use by content creators. We detail our challenges in developing a narrative which fulfills these goals, including a description of the final story framework. We discuss the results of user trials and suggest future application possibilities; the evolution of the framework in addition to the framework itself, may be instructive to developers of distributed, context-aware digital stories.

http://mf.media.mit.edu/pubs/conference/AuthoringFlexible.pdf