“I’m intrigued by AR’s power to transform the world we’re already in, simply by adding a layer of narrative” – Robert Morgan

Two months after the release of his book Storytelling for Spatial Computing and Mixed Reality: The Art of Augmenting Imagination (Routledge 2025), which quickly sold out in its paperback edition, we sat down with author Robert Morgan.

Cover: Augmented Reality Galery – artoflondon.co.uk

Well known in the immersive world for his pivotal contributions to Augmented Reality and for projects showcased at some of the most important international events (such as A Fisherman’s Tale and A Fisherman’s Tale 2), Robert shared with us his vision of the spatial narrative design that defines AR, along with his deep love for this form of storytelling, to which he has dedicated his new book.

Described as “a clear, accessible manual of storytelling techniques and learning activities for spatial computing, augmented reality, and mixed reality”, Storytelling for Spatial Computing and Mixed Reality: The Art of Augmenting Imagination “covers the key skills that the next generation of digital storytellers will need, providing readers with practical tools for creating digital stories and adventures out in the real world”

The early days of designing augmented narratives

Robert Morgan – For almost as long as I’ve been designing and writing experiences, I’ve also felt the urge to share what I’ve learned along the way. I genuinely enjoy teaching, and I’m strongly motivated to pass on the knowledge I’ve gained through experience.

R. M. – Part of that comes from how challenging it was to build a career in augmented reality. I’ve been working in the field since before Pokémon Go, back when most people hadn’t even heard of AR. It’s been a long road, and although it wasn’t easy, I had certain advantages – like being a white man. That’s why I care deeply about making it easier for others to tell stories in this format without having to learn to do everything, as I did.

R. M. – I was fortunate to begin my career at PlayStation, where I worked on two games for the Wizarding World franchise, called Wonderbook. These came packaged as physical books that players used with the PlayStation camera. 

R. M. – Watching early user testing sessions on this project was eye-opening: these kids were interacting with augmented books for the first time, and what struck me most was how they saw themselves as the protagonists of the story. That’s when I realised: in AR, the player is the protagonist. And that idea thrilled me.

R. M. – At PlayStation I also worked on early virtual reality projects, including writing the first playable demo for PlayStation VR. Over the last decade, I’ve continued working across both VR and AR, but AR is what truly captured my imagination. The idea that you could layer a story onto the real world, and that the player could experience it as themselves, was deeply compelling. It taps into a universal fantasy, something people are already eager to believe in.

R. M. – I also became fascinated by how a simple, light narrative overlay could shift someone’s whole perception of the world around them. I was drawn to the idea of augmenting places, using GPS to surface hidden stories, for example. That’s a well-established use of AR, explored by many others before me. I was standing on the shoulders of pioneers like Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller, and the collective Blast Theory – artists who created location-based, often audio-driven work.

R. M. – To explore all this, I started my own studio. In those early days of AR, we were constantly experimenting: with prototyping, with audio, with mobile tech and GPS. We were testing what a narrative that truly augmented the player’s reality could look and feel like. We wanted to design experiences we really believed in.

R. M. – Later, the opportunity came to write a textbook. As a visiting fellow at King’s College London, I do a lot of lecturing, teaching, and public speaking, often around the ethics of augmented reality. When the publishers approached me, they likely expected a book on VR, since I was best known for writing VR games. But I pitched a book on AR instead. Because while I love VR as an immersive escape, a world you enter, I’m more intrigued by AR’s power to transform the world you’re already in, simply by adding a layer of narrative.

R. M. – The book became a way to share everything I had learned. It begins and ends with the phrase “Prove me wrong”, a reminder that my goal wasn’t to write a definitive guide, but to offer what I’ve learned so far. It’s still early days for AR, after all, and I wanted to make that clear from the start. 

R. M. – I set out to share the techniques I’d developed, to help others build careers as augmented or spatial storytellers. But I also believe that the people who will truly define this medium are the next generation; the ones growing up with it now. They’re the ones who will figure out what storytelling in AR can really become. My hope was simply to help clear their path.

Private layers and how AR personalizes the world around us

R. M. – I actually have a really broad definition of augmented reality. For me, if you’re walking down the street and the right song comes on your headphones, and it shifts the way you walk, changes how you see the movement around you, then your reality is being augmented. I don’t care what technology you’re using or if you’re using any at all.

R. M. – That’s why I talk quite a bit about the Walkman in my book. It’s a great example of how we can understand the way narrative changes our context, how it can manipulate or enhance our experience by integrating storytelling into into the real world that surrounds us.

R. M. – But it also helps us understand one of the more unusual aspects of augmented reality, which is that many AR experiences are inherently private. They’re often about an individual having a specific, personal recontextualization of how they relate to the world around them.

R. M. – That means two people standing at the same bus stop might be seeing completely different versions of the world through their respective AR experiences. And that’s incredibly exciting from a gameplay or multiplayer storytelling perspective because it allows for a non-zero-sum approach to narrative. One person’s experience doesn’t take away from another’s; they can coexist, layered on top of the same physical space.

R. M. – However, this also carries serious social implications. We already live in very different realities, shaped by our experiences, beliefs, and the information we consume. AR could amplify that even further, making it possible for people to inhabit even more conceptually and perceptually distinct – or polarised – worlds.

The three core pillars of emotional immersion: SEEING

R. M. – For me, there are three pillars of emotional immersion, which I discuss in my book: seeing, being, and being seen. I explore these concepts first in the context of virtual reality, then use the same pillars to examine what changes in augmented reality. From there, I begin outlining some foundational principles for storytelling in augmented reality.

R. M. – Seeing is fundamental to both VR and AR, but many experiences don’t go far beyond that. The way we see the world, and how virtual reality alters that perception, is central to how the technology functions. That’s where much of the focus has been. But seeing alone only gets you so far: there’s also the feeling of presence and the sense of being somewhere. Ideally, an emotional stake in the situation. In virtual reality, it’s often said that you can transport a player to a new place by immersing them in a virtual environment. But for that to work, they need to feel embodied in that space. Only then can real immersion happen. Only then do they begin to care about where they are and what’s happening there.

R. M. – It’s similar in augmented reality. In AR, we might be working with graphical overlays on the real world. That could be a simple heads-up display like those in current smart glasses, or a more advanced visual system that places digital graphics contextually into the real environment. This might be viewed through a smartphone or, more and more often, through a passthrough headset like the Quest 3.

R. M. – Seeing the world differently is the first step. You might spot a Pikachu on the street corner, but that’s just a tech demo… until it starts to shift the way you exist in that space.

The three core pillars of emotional immersion: BEING

R. M. – In the case of Pokémon Go, the experience changes your identity by adding a layer of narrative to who you are, not just by placing visible items into the environment. It gives you the identity of a Pokémon Trainer. 

R. M. – One of the clever things about Pokémon Go is that it builds on an existing, widely recognized identity from the cartoons. It taps into a very common fantasy, one that’s easy to access: almost anyone can become a Pokémon Trainer. It doesn’t say much about who you are, and it doesn’t ask you to role-play very deeply. It just invites you to be a version of yourself who puts on the cap and wants to be the very best, like no one ever was. It’s a fantasy that’s immediately relatable and simple to step into.

R. M. – That’s the moment when you’re not just seeing the world in a slightly augmented way, but also being in a slightly augmented way. And that’s where your emotional stake begins. That’s where the storytelling really starts.

The three core pillars of emotional immersion: BEING SEEN

R. M. – However, to create a truly compelling experience that builds deep emotional immersion, you have to go one step further. For me, that third element is always about self-consciousness and about being seen. It means recognizing that the player isn’t just seeing the world and being in the world, but that the world is also looking back at them. That’s a fundamental part of how we relate to the world around us.

R. M. – None of us move through the world purely as observers who are completely unobserved. And if we feel unobserved, that itself becomes an emotional experience.

R. M. – In Pokémon Go, what made that first summer of 2016 after it launched so compelling wasn’t just that it was a good game. It was that there was a critical mass of other people out there: there was this sudden, shared groundswell of nerdiness that created a collective moment. It wasn’t just popularity: you could walk into a park and see other people with Pikachu on their screens, heads tilted down, phones in hand, and you’d instantly recognize them. It created a shared feeling that a hidden population of fellow fans had come out into the open.

R. M. – You played it while seeing other people, and while being seen by them. You became part of their experience, and they became part of yours. That’s what gave the world a slightly augmented feeling – not just because of the digital Pokémon you could find, but because the world was now populated by people hunting them. It felt like a community. And you were part of that community.

R. M. – That aspect of being seen is incredibly important. The same is true in virtual reality. It’s not enough to enter a virtual space, you need the characters there to acknowledge your presence. If they don’t, your presence loses meaning. If you approach an NPC and they don’t respond, or if you get too close and they don’t back away, you instantly know they’re not real. They don’t recognize you. And that breaks the emotional and social realism of the experience.

R. M. – We’re always trying to determine whether we’re being seen, because if we’re not, then what we do in the environment doesn’t really matter. The same principle applies in augmented reality. 

Augmented self-consciousness 

R. M. – In AR, the player is still in the real world. AR doesn’t replace reality, it doesn’t overwrite it. If your goal is to place the player somewhere entirely new, use virtual reality instead.

R. M. – The example I always use is the “dragon’s cave”. VR is perfect for placing the player directly into a dragon’s cave, completely replacing their senses and immersing them in a new, magical environment. 

R. M. – Augmented reality, on the other hand, doesn’t overwrite the world – it works with it. You could try to reskin the entire room around the player to look like a cave, but the more powerful move in AR is this: sneak up behind them, whisper in their ear, and say, “What if you were secretly a dragon?”.

R. M. – That small suggestion places them inside a narrative. It makes them the protagonist. And suddenly, they’re seeing and interacting with everything around them in a different way. You’re using their sense of being seen, their self-consciousness, to deepen immersion.

R. M. – We often think of self-consciousness as the enemy of immersion, as something that breaks the experience. When a player becomes self-aware, we tend to assume the illusion has failed. But I don’t think of immersion as a fragile spell we cast. It’s an agreement we make with the player. And since the world always looks back at us, since augmented reality always unfolds within real environments, we can’t erase the player’s self-consciousness. We have to make it part of the story.

Co-authorship of stories in AR

R. M. – Fan culture is such a fascinating example of all this. When you’re deeply involved in a fan community, it becomes a kind of augmented reality in itself. It’s almost the ultimate expression of the “death of the author.” You’re not just passively absorbing what the creator has made – you’re transforming it, reimagining it, and anticipating where it could go simply by engaging with it, often through acts like writing or creating fan works.

R. M. – There’s even some historical evidence of this dynamic in older literature. Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy serialized their novels and responded, in real time, to the way readers were reacting to them. So in a sense, literature has always had this potential for dialogue between creator and audience.

R. M. – That’s what I find so compelling: this approach, like augmented reality, opens up a new kind of relationship between author and audience.

R. M. – All artistic media shape that relationship in different ways. But in augmented reality, the connection between author and audience becomes especially interesting. Just like in interactive games, the audience (the player) is also the protagonist. And that means the author can’t fully control the experience.

R. M. – As in video games, the creator can build the world and write parts of the story, but eventually they hand over control. The player takes it from there, becoming the protagonist and determining what happens by moving through the story in their own way.

R. M. – Obviously, if you’re playing a cinematic, linear experience like The Last of Us, you might be controlling the protagonist’s avatar on screen, but you don’t really influence how the story unfolds. It’s a linear narrative in a great game, that tells the story in a very deliberate way.

R. M. – In any form of interactive fiction where the player can affect the story, the author doesn’t write the full story, they co-write it with the player. As a game writer, I’ve always had to write parts of the story and then hand it off to the player, trusting them to finish it in their own way.

R. M. – In augmented reality, that dynamic shifts even further. The player becomes the true driver of the narrative – a genuine co-author. Because in AR, the player isn’t just embodying a character the author has written: they are themselves. It’s much closer to role-playing.

R. M. – In the book, I write a lot about live-action role-playing (LARP) and traditional role-playing. Many of the techniques I use to design an effective AR protagonist are drawn from LARP, because that’s exactly how we build a character in AR: by understanding that the player brings so much of themselves to it. They don’t just need to identify with the character, they need to actively collaborate with the author to create that character. The character becomes an extension, an augmentation of their own identity.

R. M. – We can absolutely ask augmented players to role-play, especially if they’re stepping into a familiar archetype, like a Pokémon Trainer. But the key is to invite them to bring a lot of themselves into that character as well. Because in AR, they’re still moving through the world as-themselves. Even if it’s overlaid with graphics, 90% of what they see is still the real world. They can reach out and touch it. If they’re walking down the street or moving through their own home, there are constant reminders that they’re grounded in reality. What they’re experiencing is simply a narratively augmented version of it.

AR between roleplaying, theatre and cinema

R. M. – For me, AR shouldn’t try to completely overwrite the real world or replace it with a fully authored fiction. We need to develop different techniques. And I do think we have a lot to learn from role-playing, from immersive theatre, and from other media that guide players into a role. We give them just enough of an identity, just enough cues or clues about their augmented role, and then let them develop it for themselves.

R. M. – Then, the magic happens when they discover they’re already on stage. They’re already in costume. They’re already performing as the protagonist, and this is before they even realized they were role-playing!

R. M. – Especially in virtual reality, but also in video games, a lot of the narrative design references still come from cinema, and there’s a real limit to how useful that cinematic mindset is in these fields.

R. M. – Despite the fact that games have been worth more than the film industry for quite some time, I still see a lot of VR scripts and concepts coming from people who are thinking in “film brain”. There’s always a giveaway. At some point in the script, you’ll read a line like, “And then we see…”. And that doesn’t work in VR. In VR, there’s only the player in the headset. And you can’t guarantee they’ll be looking where you want them to look. They might be staring off in the wrong direction entirely. And if you’re trying to force their gaze into one fixed place, you might as well just make a flat-screen film.

R. M. – So, from this point of view, theatre has always been a more useful reference for me, especially when it comes to blocking and staging a scene in VR. 

R. M. – All this becomes even more relevant in augmented reality. AR doesn’t give you a camera. It doesn’t give you an editor. It doesn’t give you mise-en-scène in the cinematic sense. In AR, the director and the designer have very little control over what the player is actually seeing.

R. M. – There’s a wonderful quote I often reference – something I came across on Twitter years ago, from XR researcher Timoni West: “Storytelling folks who are annoyed by VR because they can’t control the camera are in for a wild ride when they move into AR and realise that they can’t control the set either”.

R. M. – In VR, in fact, it’s almost as if the author builds a world, then the player opens the door and steps inside as-themselves. And from that moment on, the designer or storyteller has to adapt to that presence. The player is not just watching the world; they’re part of it. They act within it. And the story needs to account for that.

R. M. – In AR, the situation is even more grounded. The author might be able to inject story elements into the real world, but the player is already there. They live in that world. They know how it works, they understand its rules. All the storyteller can really do is introduce a new layer of context – just enough to shift how the player relates to their environment.

R. M. – From there, the narrative becomes a hybrid: part player identity, part real-world setting. It’s about building a story that blends both what the player brings with them, and the place they’re physically standing in.

R. M. – AR happens in the real world. So immersive theatre, live role-playing, and similar forms are far more relevant references when you’re thinking about how to structure a story and how the player, or audience member, is going to relate to it.

First steps in AR narrative

R. M. – There are now some fantastic mixed reality and augmented reality prototypes and games out there, especially on the Quest 3. That device has really blown the doors off in terms of enabling bedroom developers to create and test mixed reality experiences quickly and affordably. It’s incredibly exciting: I’ve been talking about this space for over ten years, and now it finally feels like we’re on the edge of something big.

R. M. – The first and most important thing I’d say to people who want to step into this world is: this is a brand-new medium. Your instincts, your personal ideas about how to tell a good story in AR, are just as valid as anyone else’s. In fact, even something as classic as the “Hero’s Journey” has to be rethought, or possibly discarded altogether, when we talk about augmented reality. Here, the player is the protagonist and that player could be anyone. They might not fit the mold of a traditional Hollywood hero.

R. M. – If you want to create a narrative in augmented reality, I think the starting point is to let go of some control. You can’t plan and script every beat like you would in a novel, a film, or even a video game. You have to understand that your story is entering the player’s world and not the other way around.

R. M. – But once you’re okay with that – and if you’re the kind of storyteller who finds that idea exciting – then AR might be the right medium for you. 

R. M. – What I always suggest, then, is to think about how narrative can recontextualize someone’s relationship with the world around them in simple, grounded ways.

R. M. – One method I still use in workshops is to ask people to go to a public place they know well and create a short voice note designed to be listened to by someone moving through that space. It might guide them on a walk through a park. It might offer an alternative museum tour. Or it could dramatize a public square by suggesting that the people around you are secretly vampires.

R. M. – It’s a simple exercise. You only need your smartphone. And then you can test that piece of narrative with friends, see how much it shifts their perception of the place. See whether the next time they walk through it, they remember what you made them feel. See if that story sticks with them.

R. M. – Once you’re comfortable augmenting someone’s reality through nothing more than audio storytelling, then you can start thinking about how to use a headset. You can begin imagining the kind of narratives you want to build two, three, even five or six years from now, when we may be wearing glasses that can overlay digital graphics onto the real world. Glasses that can reskin your street, turning it into a gas-lit fantasy straight out of Victorian London.

With great powers come great responsibilities: how to ethically recontextualize reality

R. M. – One of the core principles I always emphasize and that I explore in the book is that the power to recontextualize and reskin reality is incredibly strong. It has real potential to influence how people think and how they perceive the world around them.

R. M. – We already see this online: people are constantly being influenced by the media they consume. It’s become easy to build a kind of personal media bubble, where you only see content that aligns with your beliefs or your ideology. That can quickly lead to people living in a slightly radicalized version of reality.

R. M. – The internet allows us to filter the world and to build ideological echo chambers. And augmented reality carries that same potential, but with even more immersive impact. If we have the ability to reskin the world to make it look a certain way, then we also carry a responsibility for how we use that tool.

R. M. – John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic, has spoken about this. He’s talked about the idea that we should have the right to see the world through our own chosen lens. That’s a powerful and appealing vision. And sure, within our minds, we’re all entitled to our way of seeing the world.

R. M. – But we also need to be cautious. If the technology allows us to wear rose-tinted glasses – literally or metaphorically – or to see the world through an ideological filter or a game layer that depicts other people as orcs, demons, or simply as NPCs, that’s where the danger begins. It might reinforce harmful tendencies that already exist, like seeing others as less human, or treating public spaces as territories to be dominated or fought over.

R. M. – These are serious considerations. And the generation growing up now, the first native generation of augmented reality, will have to face them. They will need to figure out what it means to have the power to customize reality, not just their own, but potentially the perception of others.

Predicting the future: a fool’s game? 

R. M. – These aren’t necessarily dangers I see happening right now. But when you look at how young people are using Horizon Worlds and VRChat today, you can start to glimpse the direction things might go. Their behaviour often frustrates older generations in VR. You see kids in those spaces having loud, chaotic, freewheeling fun in GORILLA TAG, or pretending to be fast food employees, and some people roll their eyes. But I think a lot of that comes from the fact that this is a generation that lost part of their childhood to the pandemic. These are kids looking for ways to socialise, to find safe spaces for chaotic, playful moments – the kind that my generation had just by running around outside with friends.

R. M. – Now they’re looking for safer ways to do that. There’s even a Spin the Bottle instance in Rec Room that’s incredibly popular. You can look at that and find it a little sad, or maybe even a little funny. But really, it’s just young people trying to access a familiar adolescent ritual in a way that feels safe, because they may have grown up in a world where something like Spin the Bottle felt completely out of reach.

R. M. – That’s why I think so much about ethics. I don’t want to look back one day and feel like I was part of the problem, like some early internet pioneers, including Tim Berners-Lee, who now reflect on what went wrong.

R. M. – All these ideas about customizable, contextual, or subjective versions of reality, they’re not new in philosophical terms. We’ve always all lived in different, subjective versions of the world. But the difference now is that we can make that subjectivity literal and graphical. We can wear a pair of glasses that allows us to see the world in a particular way. That’s new. And it raises issues we’ve never really had to confront on this scale.

R. M. – Not everyone will have access to this technology. As with most things, it will likely be a minority, those who can afford it, who get to live in a more usable, more sensuous, more helpful version of reality. Others might be stuck in a kind of “free-to-play” version of reality.

R. M. – The truth is, the rich and powerful already live in a different tier of reality. They can insulate themselves from many of the world’s harshest aspects. They can choose not to see certain things. That’s privilege in its purest form. 

R. M. – And so I’ve never been too worried about that old sci-fi trope, the idea that people will get lost in a VR simulation and forget the real world. People have always gotten lost in fantasy.

R. M. – What concerns me more are the factors already shaping our politics and societies today: our very human tendency to live inside filtered, curated realities. Versions of the world that are shaped by ideology. And ultimately, that might be what augmented reality becomes particularly good at.

R. M. – We need to be aware of that. Because if you can put on a pair of glasses and, as part of a game, the enemy faction gets visualised as orcs, even though they’re just people walking down the street… that’s a significant social shift. That affects how we behave, how we see others, how society functions.

R. M. – It gets even more troubling when bystanders who aren’t even participating in the game get drawn into it. If they’re being rendered as NPCs, or as objects, or trees, without their knowledge or consent, that’s a serious ethical problem. And it becomes especially urgent when we bring AI into the picture.

R. M. – AI is the missing link that allows us to reskin the world at scale. But it also means we’re not fully in control of the world we’re seeing. The traditional collaboration between author and audience starts to break down when there’s a black box in the middle shaping the experience. That’s unsettling.

R. M. – We could end up with tools that let us create a version of reality that suits our comfort level. Glasses that let you see everyone else in their underwear so you’re less nervous. But if that’s done to you, without your consent, that’s not okay.

R. M. – And that could lead to serious alienation. A person might walk down the street without ever encountering something that challenges them. And that’s a dangerous place for a society to be in. It destroys empathy. It weakens social cohesion.

R. M. – So yes, maybe I’m talking myself out of a few future jobs by saying this, but for me, it’s essential to talk about the ethics just as much as the storytelling. Because storytelling runs on empathy. Good storytelling requires it. That’s not just a lofty ideal… it’s how stories work.

R. M. – And if you’re a storyteller in this medium, you have to understand that you’re working within an ecosystem shaped by powerful technologies, by major companies, and by systems that may be used to persuade people – not just emotionally, but ideologically or commercially.

R. M. – This new frontier is thrilling. It’s an incredible opportunity for storytelling. But just like with all forms of story, if you’re good at it, you have the power to influence how people see the world. And that has to come with responsibility. Because storytelling, at its core, should build empathy.

You can buy Storytelling for Spatial Computing and Mixed Reality: The Art of Augmenting Imagination directly from the Routledge website and find out more about it at https://augmentingimagination.com/.