Location-based stories are everywhere around us. Any location that we travel to or walk by in our everyday lives can become the backdrop or even the main character of a story at any point. Like humans, places have a lot to tell about their history and evolution with time. Since the dawn of time maps have acted as a powerful medium for telling stories either showing the locations where the stories or events took place or telling stories about the places themselves. With the advancement of technology and with the widening of the scopes of stories, maps themselves have changed their forms from printed to digital and it is still expanding. Mobile augmented reality (AR) is one of the latest additions to this field which extends the dimensions of maps by combining reality with virtuality. With augmented reality, the virtual story elements can be displayed on the mobile camera screen where the real life scenarios in the background act like a realistic three dimensional base map. Although the technology is growing popularity in many ways, the scientific exploration of the design concept for telling location-based stories with AR has received little attention. This research addresses this issue and aims to recommend some design principles for location-based storytelling in AR to provide the audience with the best possible experience. To achieve this goal, the existing patterns of using different visualization elements in map-based stories are looked into through a comparative study on three different media: printed maps, web maps and existing augmented and virtual reality applications. Based on the findings and patterns derived from the comparative study, a conceptual design, portrayed through mockups, is developed for a mobile AR application as a case study. The purpose of the intended application is to give a tour of the main campus of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) for tourists and students combining elements for storytelling and route visualization. The usability of the mockup design is then evaluated through a user study conducted as an online semi-structured interview involving observation and thinking aloud methods. From the user requirements and feedback obtained from the usability evaluation, the general recommendations for designing a mobile AR app for location-based storytelling is proposed to help with the future application development in the early phase of designing.     «

Location-based stories are everywhere around us. Any location that we travel to or walk by in our everyday lives can become the backdrop or even the main character of a story at any point. Like humans, places have a lot to tell about their history and evolution with time. Since the dawn of time maps have acted as a powerful medium for telling stories either showing the locations where the stories or events took place or telling stories about the places themselves. With the advancement of technol...     »