Advanced interactive digital storytelling in digital heritage applications

Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) is a way of communicating information in the metaverse (Barbara and Haahr, 2022). In this paper we introduce the Advanced Interactive Digital Storytelling methodology (A-IDS), as a combination of IDS with gameplay elements. We show that applications created using this methodology offer unique immersive experiences of historical objects and events to museum visitors and online. In this paper, we describe it on a use case of the Trebinje Fortresses VR project. Austrian-Hungarian Fortresses around Trebinje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, are in decay, hardly accessible, and completely neglected. They can be explored in Virtual Reality through an application that combines Interactive Digital Storytelling narrated by officers who used to inhabit them with gameplays where the users become carrier pigeons in the first mission and get a task to accomplish in a fortress underground, in the second. If successful, they get the opportunity to explore digitized museum exhibits found in the fortress. The application is installed in the Trebinje Museum. The quality of user experience will be proven through an evaluation study.