nan0sphere: Location-Driven Fiction for Groups of Users

We developed a locative fiction application called nan0sphere and deployed it on the UCLA campus. This application presents an interactive narrative to users working in a group as they move around the campus. Based on each user’s current location, previously visited locations, actions taken, and on the similar attributes of other users in the same group, the story will develop in different ways. Group members are encouraged by the story to move independently, with their individual actions and progress affecting the narrative and the overall group experience. Eight different locations on campus are involved in this story. Groups consist of four participants, and the complete story unfolds through the actions of all four group members. The supporting system could be used to create other similar types of locative literature, possibly augmented with multimedia, for other purposes and in other locations. We will discuss benefits and challenges of group interactions in locative fiction, infrastructure required to support such applications, issues of determining user locations, and our experiences using the application.