Ambedo: Immersive Storytelling through Augmented Reality

The territory of locative media, coupled with augmented reality, offers unique opportunities to excavate and unpack rich historic events, in immersive storytelling. In September of 1943, during World War II, approximately 5,200 Italian soldiers were massacred on the Greek island of Kefalonia by Nazi troops. This massacre is credited as one of the largest ever prisoner-of-war massacres in recent history (Lamb, 1996) and left an indelible mark on the island of Kefalonia. In 2019, Configuring Kommos: Narrative, Event, Place and Memory, an interdisciplinary research project, began an investigation into the triangulation of narrative within the complexity of this tragic collection of events. This paper presents the structural formation of the augmented reality app, Ambedo, currently under development as part of the broader project. Ambedo, principally reliant on geo-referencing for navigating the nuanced terrain of the island, serves as a counter monument to those martyred while seeking to facilitate access to the ontological formation of the event(s).