The Lost Cosmonaut project was based on a collaboration between the artist Axel Vogelsang and the Global Information Systems (GlobIS)
research group at ETH Zurich to investigate the application of the interactive paper platform in an artistic setting for interactive narratives and story writing. The work was part of the
Artist in Labs programme, a Swiss initiative trying to bring together artists and scientists.
A user sits in a fairly dark room in front of a semicircular desk. The wall in front of the user contains a large round hole
which is used as a screen for projecting digital information. On the desk there is a Nokia Digital Pen and three documents forming
part of an interactive narrative: a star map, a book, and a collection of love letters. Ambient sound in combination with artificial
lighting is applied to generate different moods.
Fig. 1: Star map
The content of the interactive narrative is based around the idea of a cosmonaut lost in space. The user interacts with the three
documents on the table containing information about the lost cosmonaut. While a visitor is interacting with the documents, the content
presented on the round screen as well as the ambient sound and the lighting are changing (ambient moods). There is some pre-authored content
in these documents, but visitors are encouraged to add texts and drawings to the artefacts themselves. While the linearity of the story
is already broken by giving a user the freedom to select arbitrary information in the three documents, each user further becomes an
author of the story by adding their own content. Thereby, the interactive narrative collaboratively written by different users evolves
over time. Note that the information is written into physical space as well as captured and integrated into the narrative in digital form.
Fig. 2: Book of broken images
There are three documents building the interactive narrative; the love letters (see Fig. 3), a star map (see Figure 1) and a book of broken images (see Fig. 2). The love letters
mainly contain parts of handwritten sentences or even single words with gaps in between. The user is encouraged to fill in the missing
parts and to continue the love letters. The second document, an ancient star map contains stars labelled with numbers. Visitors can
dedicate stars to family and friends by writing names alongside stars. Finally, there is the book of broken images containing torn
images of cosmonauts, landscapes etc. where half of each image is missing. Some of the missing half images have been drawn by somebody
else and the visitor is encouraged to follow suit.
Fig. 3: Love letters
In the Lost Cosmonaut installation, the ambient mood changes based on the document a visitor is working on. Using simple document
tracking, the system detects which document lies at the centre of the desk. The documents have been tagged with RFID identifiers and
an antenna has been placed underneath the table. The RFID antenna detects when a new document is placed at the centre of the table and
initiates the activation of a new mood. An RFID plug-in has been implemented for
the iServer platform to support the necessary
document tracking.
An interesting and innovative aspect of the Lost Cosmonaut installation is the fact that information written into the physical space is
handled in three different ways to integrate it into the interactive narrative. To illustrate what we mean by the three different ways
of content handling, we discuss the interaction with one of the three documents and outline how content from all three documents becomes
interweaved to a single story space. Figure 4 shows an abstract representation of the three different documents. As described
earlier, for each of the three documents there exists some pre-authored content and new content generated by each user. In the figure
this fact is represented by separating each document into existing content and new content.
Fig. 4: Interactive desk
Let us have a look at the star map document to explain the linking between the digital and physical space and show the three different
ways of handling information written on a document. If a user writes a new dedication on the star map, first of all, the information
is physically "stored" as new content on the document and forms part of a subsequent user’s experience. By writing a dedication on the
star map, a new active area is generated for the handwritten information. As illustrated in Fig. 5 the new active area is linked
with image and film material. If later, the same or another user touches the dedication, an image or film is shown. Finally, the dedication
is captured and stored in a database as an XML document containing single positions together with a timestamp and the pressure of
the pen nib. The digitally captured information is dynamically linked from active areas in the love letters and gets activated when
the corresponding part of a sentence is selected in one of the love letters. The temporal information that is stored together with the
stroke information is used to replay the writing of the text as an animated drawing.
Fig. 5: Cross-linked resources
The Lost Cosmonaut installation showed how interactive paper can not only be integrated with digital information, but become part
of a whole interactive environment including video screens, ambient sound and light. By cross-linking physical and digital
information snippets, iServer has been used to author an interactive narrative where each user experiences their own story in a
non-linear way. The Lost Cosmonaut interactive narrative encourages visitors to generate new physical and digital content resulting
in an active cross-media story evolving over time. A first prototype of the Lost Cosmonaut was shown in December 2004 in an
exhibition at ETH Zurich.
