Abstract:

Visual narratives have been classified based on how people see and interact with it. The broad categories being Static Visual Narrative (SVN), Dynamic Visual Narrative (DVN) and Interactive Visual Narrative (IVN). In this study we are concerned with Interactive Visual Narratives; essentially a visual which has a narrative aspect to it and that involves interaction from the viewer for the narrative to proceed.

One of the important challenges in the representation of events (a narrative) with its actors and causation is the mapping of temporality of events and references to place using the same space metaphor.

In human computer interaction various patterns have been identified and methods like progress bars, timelines and fade out effects have been proposed to visually represent temporal sequencing. These patterns however do not provide any pointer on how to capture the essential elements and their inter-relationship and represent them to bring about an engaging interaction. In an interactive system, the interfaces need to provide an appropriate conceptual model to the user, that incorporates notions of change of time and place, and movement of events. This will help the user interact and navigate through a sequence of events or through places.

The study tries to borrow from the fields of interactive storytelling, gaming, narratology and human-computer interaction to come up with a model that can fill this lacuna. The study is focused on the identification of elements that are essential to the depiction of events that involve time-space relationships and categorization of these different methods of representation that could be used in the field of interaction design while designing systems with time-space relations