Leveraging Transmedia storytelling to engage tourists in the understanding of the destination’s local heritage

Abstract

AbstractTransmedia Stories are becoming an increasingly important technique for the tourism industry. They are successful tools to engage, inspire and gather audiences online and offline. In this article, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Fragments of Laura, a bespoke Transmedia Storytelling (TS) experience designed to involve visitors in developing knowledge and awareness about the cultural and natural heritage of Madeira Island. Fragments of Laura (FoL) is composed of two interconnected components: a Location-Aware Multimedia Story, and a Hypermedia Platform populated with locally collected testimonies and interviews. Results from the extensive evaluation of Fragments of Laura, highlights the potential of interactive multimedia, TS in particular, in engaging tourists with the destination values and community. Our contribution is twofold, on one hand we extend on the state of the art of multimedia interactive storytelling, with the description of the Fragments of Laura TS artifact. On the other hand, results from FoL evaluation highlight how the artifact impacts on the tourism experience its implications for the design of future tourism driven TS experiences.