Webrecorder support for interactive narratives?

[nicolabingham]

Hi, (not an issue but a question...)

At the BL we're trying to archive interactive narratives - websites where the reader determines the journey through the story. They are optimised for viewing on tablets and mobiles and make use of the client's systems, cameras & location data, etc. I know webrecorder doesn't currently support mobile devices but we've been trying to record the desktop versions. Some examples are: https://breathe-story.com/ https://a-universe-explodes.com/ I appreciate they are complex digital objects and we're not expecting to capture all the functionality but if we could capture the text of the narrative it would be a good start. Is there any appetite for looking at this kind of content in webrecorder? I wonder if anyone else in the community has raised similar requirements?

[ikreymer]

Using Chrome's "Mobile Emulation" option, it's actually possible to capture the site running in phone emulator mode, using either your native Chrome or enable it in the remote browser (Chrome 60).

You can do this by enabling developer tools, as explained here: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/device-mode/#viewport

This allows you to navigate through the site to capture, however it seems certain aspects require the accelerometer to work fully, so those may not be getting captured yet.

For replay, the user would need to follow the steps above to enable this mode also.

With additional work, it is possible to make the phone emulation mode more easily accessible, and perhaps support full-fledged mobile emulation, but we don't have the resources to devote to that at this point.

Here are examples of Webrecorder running with Chrome manually set to a phone device:

(Enable in Remote Chrome 60):

(Enabling on a native chrome browser)

[m4rk3r]

Adding a few more notes from some quick testing:

• We currently don't forward special access requests (camera, microphone, geolocation) from sites being captured. We can update this shortly to better improve interactive sites that utilize inputs like this. Replay of these features will likely use live input and not that of the recorded version.
• It appears the piece uses motion information from the phone to reveal text and other effects. At the moment this will be tricky to support with desktop based phone emulation. It seems that this isn't currently possible by capturing with a mobile device either.