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Preserving Narrative Integrity in Distributed Immersive Storytelling through Coherence-Aware Adaptation

Qadri, Syed Safi Uddin orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-1310-6982 and Muntean, Gabriel-Miro orcid logoORCID: 0000-0002-9332-4770 (2026) Preserving Narrative Integrity in Distributed Immersive Storytelling through Coherence-Aware Adaptation. In: ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX ’26), 9 June 2026, Athlone, Ireland. (In Press)

Abstract
Immersive storytelling increasingly relies on distributed architectures to enable collaborative co-creation across remote participants, but network impairments such as delay and burst latency can introduce inconsistencies in shared object states, avatar gestures, and spatial audio cues that disrupt narrative coherence. While prior work has examined the perceptual impact of de-synchronization, existing approaches do not formally characterize the structural conditions under which such inconsistencies break narrative coherence and, consequently, narrative integrity. In this paper, we introduce Narrative Interaction Coherence (NIC), a system-level metric that captures causal event ordering violations, temporal misalignment, and state divergence in distributed immersive environments. We develop a simulation framework for collaborative storytelling under controlled network impairments and compare latency-based and QoE-inspired adaptation strategies with a coherence-aware approach. Results show that coherence-aware adaptation substantially reduces narrative break events and incoherence duration, maintaining high coherence even under adverse conditions. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly modeling structural narrative coherence as a design objective in immersive media systems and provide a foundation for future validation in real multi-user XR environments.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Workshop
Refereed:Yes
Additional Information:This publication has emanated from research jointly funded by Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland via grant 13/RC/2094_2 for Lero Research Centre for Software, and co-funded by the European Union under the Systems, Methods, Context (SyMeCo) programme via grant 101081459. The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only.
Uncontrolled Keywords:Immersive storytelling, narrative coherence, distributed XR, multimodal interaction, synchronization
Subjects:Computer Science > Computer engineering
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing
DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Electronic Engineering
Published in: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX ’26). . Association for Computing Machinery.
Publisher:Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright Information:Authors
Funders:Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Grant: 13/RC/2094_2 Related centre/programme: Lero Research Centre for Software, European Union Grant: 101081459 Programme: Systems, Methods, Context (SyMeCo)
ID Code:32957
Deposited On:08 Jul 2026 13:11 by Syed Safi Uddin qadri . Last Modified 08 Jul 2026 13:11
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