Project Overview – The StoryBoard Lab
The StoryBoard Lab is designed to answer one major question: How do we tell complex, compelling stories on large, interactive touch screens typically used for public information displays, for collaborative work in businesses, or, when available, for classroom purposes in educational institutions? Drawing on knowledge from the humanities, the social sciences, computer science, engineering, and the health sciences, the StoryBoard Lab will develop a program of research that will address this central question through the lens of these disciplinary fields. This research will be necessarily multidisciplinary and collaborative, providing the expected focus for a large number and broad range of innovative designs and studies.
Housed at the University of Waterloo (UW), the StoryBoard Lab will provide the infrastructure necessary to research interactive digital narrative (IDN) in an environment consisting of multiple large interactive surfaces (LIS). Defined as an “expressive narrative form in digital media implemented as a computational system containing [multiple] potential narratives and experienced through a participatory process …” (Koenitz, 2015), IDNs have typically appeared in digital games, gamification systems, simulation environments and, more recently, in pedagogy. However, the use of LIS in education not just as a means of simple presentation of knowledge but rather as an integral part of the narrative and immersion of teaching itself has not been explored. The StoryBoard lab would focus on the use of narratological tools (i.e. setting, tone, backstory, characters, three-act structure, etc.) for further engaging students in immersive learning scenarios. The StoryBoard Lab advances research in these areas by situating these IDNs on large (85-inch and 55-inch) touch displays designed for collaborative team work, combining these LIS with mobile devices to provide innovative ways to experience rich, immersive stories.
