A-photobooks Bridging the Gap between Virtual and Material Worlds Emily Corrigan-Kavanagh Background Despite the rise of digital photography, physical photos remain significant. They enable the sharing of experiences with others through their physicality (i.e. displaying, gifting) to maintain social bonds, particularly in family contexts (Rose, 2016). In fact, digital photography is still employed to create printed photobooks through online platforms such as ‘Photobox.co.uk’. Furthermore, other media can be harnessed to accentuate meanings represented in the physical world through augmented reality, where objects and environments are overlaid with additional digital information (i.e. videos, audio) increasing the multi-sensory interaction opportunities that they can afford (Ross, 2009). Project Overview This research explores how augmented photobooks, called ‘a-photobooks’, printed photobooks that are augmented by travellers with additional multimedia of their trip using a smartphone-based authoring tool, enable ‘new horizons’ in the way that travellers can create and conceptualise their holiday experiences by facilitating the generation of personal juxtapositions of multimedia, self-curated to heighten the poignancy of moments they represent. It is part of a wider multidisciplinary £1.17 million EPSRC funded research project called the Next Generation Paper Project investigating how new paper technologies can be used to connect paper to digital media in the travel and tourism sector within areas of interaction design, user research, software and hardware development, and business innovation. Employing a specialised app and smartphone-based authoring tool installed on their device, travellers can link and play personally collated video, audio, weblinks, and digital image slide shows on their phone while reading their photobook by taking a picture of its pages through the app. References Rose, G. (2016). How to Look at Family Photographs : Practices, Objects, Subjects and Places. In Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public, and The Politics of Sentiment (pp. 11–24). Farhnam: Ashgate Publishing Company. Ross, C. (2009). Augmented Reality Art : A Matter of ( non ) Destination. In Digital Arts and Culture Conference (pp. 1–8). Irvine: Digital Arts and Culture. Retrieved from papers3://publication/uuid/F1256D35-87AB-4556-9AC8-CDAF1F9DFA70 Conclusions A-photobooks enhance travel encounters by facilitating: • Additional multimedia layers through a bespoke smartphone app • Amplified awareness during travel experiences • Greater visual/auditory context for memory signifiers • Deeper reflection of related sensory stimuli Methods • One-to-one codesign workshops with nine UK resident travelers were initially held to create a-photobooks with a specialised authoring tool smartphone- based app install on the participant’s device • Subsequently, nine one-to-one follow-up semi structured interviews were used to discuss how resulting a-photobooks were employed about 2 weeks later • Data (i.e. codesign workshop and interview transcripts) was analysed using grounded theory, including open, axial and selective coding • Participants were recruited using criterion sampling such as: UK resident; adult (over 18 years of age); access to Android smartphone; and taking a family and/or friendship group holiday in the next four months Acknowledgments Special thanks are given to research project colleagues, Prof David Frohlich, Prof Caroline Scarles, Prof George Revill, Dr Jan Duppen, Dr Haiyue Yuan, Prof Miroslaw Bober, Dr Radu Sporea, Dr Brice Le Borgne, Ms Megan Beynon and Prof Alan Brown are also sincerely thanked for their hard work and contribution to the project. For further information please visit: www.NextGenerationPaper.info Results