Renderella is a is an Augmented Reality Story Engine for collaborative writers to catalyse ‘Creative Bounce’; a synchronous flow state. Immersing writers in a story of their own creation as they write within a tactile and collaborative storytelling platform, and augmenting the creative writing experience

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THE PROBLEM

Writer’s Block

Creative writing is a fundamental conduit to communicate the human condition, and to preserve and promote the richness of human culture. Helping improve creative storytelling through technology is a central objective for many writers, especially in light of looming threats from Large Language Models (LLMs) that create a growing anxiety throughout the global creative writing industry that Artificial Intelligence may rapidly devalue human creativity and automate creative writing jobs.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Creative Bounce

One opportunity for writers to overcome creative block and yield compelling stories is through enhancing Creative Bounce - a combination of interpersonal synchrony and creative flow experienced while collaborating. However, current digital collaborative story authoring applications offer little consideration for existing creative writing methods. Renderella explores the potential of Augmented Reality to provide creative writers with a novel approach for catalysing Creative Bounce during collaboration, building upon established writing techniques and structures.

INTERVIEWS

Trust The Process

Interviewees from a variety of collaborative writing backgrounds shared their writing process, and all stated that they frequently struggle with creative block. Furthermore, all participants elaborated on the rituals and methods they use to attempt to overcome creative block and attain a flow state. Casual conversations, walks, and other physical activities enabled a more creative mental state. However, many expressed how difficult it can often be to attain flow.

METHODOLOGY

Points Of Intervention

Behaviour Settings refers to the relationship between an environment and the patterns of behaviour that occur within it. Behaviour Settings canvases were used to identify the tangible elements of a collaborative storytelling environment and the behaviour patterns within them, comparing a collaborative role-playing tabletop game setting with a collaborative television writers’ room. The behaviour settings canvasses yielded clear commonalities between two disparate collaborative writing settings, particularly regarding the roles of the participants, and the props used to facilitate the session.

Behaviour Settings canvas; Commonalities in behaviour between a television writers’ room and a Dungeons & Dragons game.

PROTOTYPING

Lo-Fidelity Workshops

Carrying forward the insights from research, I built a low-fidelity ‘Augmented Reality’ environment to quickly test ideas on. In a series of collaborative writing workshops, participants built stories together within the prototype framework. Initially borrowing game mechanics from existing storytelling games, then eventually building out new mechanics to better catalyse Creative Bounce using the MDA (mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics) conceptual model for game design.

GAME MECHANICS

The Shapes of Stories

For this to function as a story engine, it needed a set of predefined elements, rules, and relationships to drive the stories forward. Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes endure as a framework for story generation, and proved successful as a foundational mechanic in the lo-fi prototyping workshop.

Kurt Vonnegut's Story Shapes categorise narratives into a few basic patterns based on the protagonist's fortune over time, graphically represented on a good-ill fortune axis against the story's progression.

STORYBOARD

Visualising User Experiences

DEVELOPMENT

Mid-Fidelity Experimenting

Moving into the Unity game engine, the next prototype needed to test real XR interactions on the HoloLens 2. I ran a user study with a combination of expert (professional writers) and naive (non-writers) users. They then filled in a validated flow-state questionnaire from the Positive Psychology Lab.

USER STUDY

Measuring Flow

As Creative Bounce is defined above as a combination of interpersonal synchrony and creative flow, this study focuses on flow as a partial measure of Creative Bounce. A user study was carried out to assess users for flow state, with a mix of nine expert and naive users. Six self-declared professional writers, and three non-writers. The study complied with standard ethical procedures.

The results show that participants experienced a mildly positive flow state while using the application, partially supporting the goal of the design, and the results somewhat bolster existing research that an immersive flow state constitutes a core part of the AR experience. These results offer a starting point for future user studies with newer iterations of the application.

DEVELOPMENT

Intuitive Interactions

Beyond the results of the flow questionnaire, the study provided a wealth of insights into user pain points. Each experiment was recorded to observe moments of success and failure, and were followed by in-depth feedback discussions.

This resulted in a new iteration of the design with a more intuitive interaction for the speech-to-text terminal. The terminal button was replaced with a tangible microphone, providing all the affordances of a real microphone to the user. Immediately, users began to create more fluid, improvised, collaborative stories.