Digital Storytelling and Social Interaction in Cultural Heritage - An Approach for Sites with Reduced Connectivity.

As mobile devices gradually became more pervasive, there has been an evolution in their use in the museum and cultural heritage context. Traditionally, audio guides and mobile mediated narratives in general, have been a single user experience. However, as a museum visit is, in most cases, social in nature, different experimental applications attempt to implement sociality in a variety of experience designs. In this work, we seek to support digitally-mediated social interaction for collocated users experiencing digital storytelling in a cultural heritage context, addressing the issue of decentralized communication across devices that are collocated, without a single point of coordination. This requirement stems from the fact that most cultural sites lack the reliable infrastructure to support network connectivity of any kind. To support social interaction, we extend an IDN authoring framework with support for collaborative experiences and evaluate it through a study with twelve participants.