Audio Augmented Reality (AAR) consists of adding spatial audio entities into the real environment. Existing mobile applications and technologies open questions around interactive and collaborative AAR. This paper proposes an experiment to examine how spatial audio can prompt and support actions in interactive AAR experiences; how distinct auditory information influence collaborative tasks and group dynamics; and how gamified AAR can enhance participatory storytelling. We are developing an interactive multiplayer experience in AAR using the Bose Frames audio sunglasses. Four participants at a time will go through a gamified story that attempts to interfere with group dynamics. In this paper we present our AAR platform and collaborative game in terms of experience design, and detail the testing methodology and analysis that we will conduct to answer our research questions.

Interactive Audio Augmented Reality (AAR) facilitates collaborative storytelling and human interaction in participatory performance. Spatial audio enhances the auditory environment and supports real-time control of media content and the experience. Nevertheless, AAR applied to interactive performance practices remains under-explored. This study examines how audio human-computer interaction can prompt and support actions, and how AAR can contribute to developing new kinds of interactions in participatory performance.This study investigates an AAR participatory performance based on the theater and performance practice by theater maker Augusto Boal. It draws from aspects of multi-player audio-only games and interactive storytelling. A user experience study of the performance shows that people are engaged with interactive content and interact and navigate within the spatial audio content using their whole body. Asymmetric audio cues, playing distinctive content for each participant, prompt verbal and non-verbal communication. The performative aspect was well-received and participants took on roles and responsibilities within their group during the experience.

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Thinking about design in post-human terms (Forlano, 2017) challenges designers to consider the effects of their designs on the more-than-human world, and in particular to consider non-human actors as users of our designs (Forlano 2017, Cruickshank & Trivedi 2017). However, the post-human turn also calls into question the modernist assumption that “good design” is predicated on notions of instrumental use, which underpins user-centred design, the dominant perspective in digital and interaction design. I propose an alternative, based on Willis’s ontological designing (Willis 2006) and Yuk Hui’s digital ontology (Hui 2016), which highlights the role of ongoing care and maintenance in the ontology of the digital, and argue that discards, and in particular digital discards, have a peculiar ontological status within this theory which offer promise for future study of digital design beyond instrumental use, and it’s entanglements with the more-than-human.