Locative Storytelling → StoryPlaces

Mixed Reality Games → LoGaCulture

David Millard

Research

I study how people create, interpret, and reason with digital systems—from hypertext and interactive narratives to mixed‑reality experiences and human–AI collaboration.

You can view my ORCHID record here (0000-0002-7512-2710).

Current Focus (2023—present)

Collaboration & Supervision. I welcome collaborators and PhD applicants across both strands below. If you’re interested in joint projects related to cultural‑heritage MR or human‑in‑the‑loop AI for knowledge work, please get in touch. Email: dem@soton.ac.uk

Prospective PhD students. Please email me a short proposal aligned to one of the areas below (and a brief CV). We can then discuss fit and whether to take an application forward. For the formal application process at Southampton, see: PhD application guidance

Potential collaborators. If you’re developing research proposals where I could contribute or lead in Human-AI interfaces, MR design, games for cultural heritage, or ethical or socio‑technical implications, feel free to email me – I’m also happy to join an exploratory consortium call.

CPD & advisory work. These research strands also inform my CPD and advisory work on responsible and effective AI adoption, ethical immersive experiences, and cultural heritage games. If you think this might be helpful in your organisation, feel free to get in touch for an informal discussion.

Ethical Mixed‑Reality Systems for Cultural Heritage

Status: NOW

Focus. My recent work on ethical mixed‑reality (MR) systems is grounded in practice, particularly in the cultural heritage domain, where immersive technologies intersect with questions of place, history, interpretation, and responsibility. I am interested in how MR systems shape meaning in situ, and how ethical considerations—care, stewardship, inclusion, and respect for place—must be designed into the experience rather than treated as an afterthought.

Core questions. What ethical responsibilities do designers have when creating immersive experiences in culturally significant places? How can mixed‑reality games and narratives work sympathetically with the genius loci (spirit of place), complementing rather than competing with site ambience and interpretation? How should such experiences balance engagement and play with authenticity, sensitivity, and long‑term value for communities and institutions?

Approach. This work has been driven primarily through large‑scale, collaborative research and design. From April 2023 to Spring 2026 I was Co‑Director of the €3.5M EU Horizon project LoGaCulture (Locative Games and Culture), which explored how mixed‑reality games and playful interventions can support cultural engagement across European heritage sites. At the Avebury UNESCO World Heritage Site I worked closely with the National Trust, co‑developing a series of interconnected mixed‑reality games and experiences that were designed and evaluated with sensitivity to the site’s character, while also considering how lessons learned locally could inform practice at a broader national level.

Writing & thinking in progress. Reflections, design insights, and related work are shared through my blog under the Mixed Reality category.

Key projects. LoGaCulture (2023–2026), EU Horizon Europe, and Case Study 1 (the Avebury mixed‑reality experiences).

Selected publication. The Ethics of Mixed Reality Games (2024; ACM Games: Research and Practice) — synthesises MR ethics into five dimensions (claim rights, duty of care, social justice, privacy, control) and identifies practical design/participant/logistics strategies for MR deployments in sensitive heritage contexts.

Human–AI Interfaces for Knowledge Work

Status: NOW

Focus. I am interested in AI as an attractive partner in knowledge work, and in how generative systems make digital knowledge and software increasingly malleable, conversational, and personalised, reshaping how they are used, valued, and trusted. My stance is explicitly human‑in‑the‑loop and augmentative: design interactions that foreground human agency, judgement, and responsibility rather than replacing them through automation.

Core questions. How does continuous adaptability change the status of digital knowledge? How can interfaces support sense‑making and deliberation rather than shortcut them? What happens to authorship, ownership, and accountability when content and software are co‑produced in interaction?

Approach. Like many people, I have been on my own personal AI journey over the last few years. I root this in my long‑standing hypertext research (reader agency, non‑linearity, interpretive control) and pursue it through sustained, hands‑on experimentation in practice—integrating AI into personal knowledge management, writing and sense‑making, organisational workflows, and learning contexts—using reflective, design‑oriented inquiry to surface emerging principles.

Writing & thinking in progress. I share ongoing ideas and early results on my blog under the Artificial Intelligence category.

Ongoing Programmes

These are research themes that I have worked on for many years and continue to actively develop. They form the stable core of my research identity.

Hypertext Systems

Status: ONGOING

Focus. Hypertext has been the intellectual backbone of my research career. My work in this area is concerned with how structure, linkage, and interaction shape meaning, interpretation, and agency in digital systems. I am particularly interested in hypertext not simply as a technical mechanism, but as a conceptual lens for understanding non‑linearity, authorship, and reader control across a wide range of interactive systems.

Enduring questions. How do different hypertext structures enable or constrain interpretation? How is agency distributed between authors, readers, and systems? What happens when links, paths, and structures are generated dynamically rather than authored in advance? How do hypertext ideas persist—and evolve—when they are embedded in narratives, games, mixed‑reality environments, and, more recently, AI‑mediated systems?

Approach. Over time, my work has combined foundational models (e.g. open and adaptive hypermedia), empirical studies of authoring and reading practice, and the design of experimental systems. A recurring theme is treating hypertext as an enabling substrate rather than a finished artefact: something that supports emergence, reinterpretation, and negotiation of meaning. This has led to sustained engagement with authoring models, structural patterns, and reflective accounts of practice, often situated within narrative and cultural contexts. This programme has been developed through long‑term engagement and leadership in the hypertext community; I currently serve as Chair of the ACM Hypertext Steering Committee.

Engelbart Award papers. I have been honoured to receive the Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award at ACM Hypertext on four occasions:

  • Experiencing the Authorial Burden (HT 2024) — examines the labour of creating complex interactive narratives and the distribution and type of work as well as the strategies for managing it.
  • Seven Hypertexts (HT 2023) — a contemporary survey that articulates hypertext as a lens for understanding interaction and structure.
  • Sculptural Hypertext in Location‑Based Narratives (HT 2016) — applies sculptural hypertext to situate narrative in place and movement, connecting directly to later mixed‑reality work.
  • On Canyons, Deltas and Plains (HT 2013) — frames locative storytelling as a hypertextual problem, establishing spatial structure as a linking mechanism.

Connection to current work. Hypertext continues to inform my research in two key ways. First, it provides the conceptual grounding for my work on interactive and mixed‑reality narratives, where space, movement, and play act as linking structures. Second, it underpins my current interest in human‑in‑the‑loop AI systems, where generative models can be understood as producing dynamic, conversational hypertexts that re‑open long‑standing questions of agency, authorship, and control.

Writing & reflection. Informal reflections and connective thinking around hypertext and narrative continue on my blog under the Hypertext category.

Interactive Digital Narratives & Mixed‑Reality Games

Status: ONGOING

Focus. I explore how narrative structure, space, and play interact to produce new forms of storytelling—across screen‑based IDN, locative media, and mixed‑reality experiences. My work connects conceptual models (narrative/hypertext theory) with systems and engines that make those models usable in practice.

Enduring questions. How do patterns, links, and spatial structures shape agency and meaning in interactive stories? What kinds of authoring support reduce the authorial burden for complex IDN? How can locative / mixed‑reality experiences remain sensitive to context and place while still enabling emergent narrative?

Approach. I combine design‑oriented inquiry (authoring models, pattern languages), systems work (platforms and engines), and empirical studies (experience, labour, and collaboration in IDN). A persistent aim is to bridge theory and tools so that conceptual advances land in forms that authors and institutions can actually use.

Tools. The two primary systems we have developed are available on GitHub:

  • LUTE — a hypertextual mixed‑reality game engine, actively developed and used in the recent LoGaCulture project
  • StoryPlaces — a web‑based locative hypertext platform and authoring tool; now a legacy system (more than a decade old)

Selected publications (most recent → oldest).

Connection to current work.This work underpins my MR for cultural heritage strand, where spatial structures, stewardship, and sensitivity to place matter. It also aligns with my human‑in‑the‑loop AI research specifically where AI is used within IDN: the focus there is on augmenting the creative process (preserving author agency, intention, and craft) while using generative systems as dynamic, conversational hypertexts that can assist with structure, variation, and iteration without displacing the author.

Prior Contributions

These areas represent substantial bodies of work that are no longer my primary focus, but which shaped my current research direction and produced significant outcomes.

E‑learning & Learning Technologies

Period: ~2006–2014 (with ongoing influence)

Focus. I explored how Open Educational Resources (OER) and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) could become practically usable in higher education—not by piling on metadata and policy, but by designing for everyday authoring and sharing practice and by treating TEL platforms as knowledge systems that must fit their social and institutional contexts. This strand was strongly influenced by the spirit of Web 2.0 and the democratisation of the web—a moment that suggested new, participatory ways to build e‑learning tools that foreground personal autonomy and agency. Those concerns about agency carry directly into my later work on MR and human‑in‑the‑loop AI.

Design‑for‑practice.

  • EdShare (Southampton → EdShareHub). An institutional repository deliberately engineered for low‑friction, day‑to‑day sharing with persistent links, collections, and lightweight workflows; later generalised as EdShareHub.
  • Language Box (FAROES/OneShare; JISC). A community repository for language teachers framed as a “living space” for working documents and remix, rather than a formal LOM‑driven deposit box; subsequently used to support other UKOER projects such as LORO.

Key contributions (selected).

  • Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing (2010; IEEE TLT) — Demonstrated that design choices and change‑agency (social affordances, lightweight contribution flows) are decisive for OER critical mass in HE; EdShare/Language Box used as case analyses.
  • Towards an Institutional PLE (2011; Institutional report/paper) — Proposed a model where the university provides a personalised interface to services/data while exposing them to students’ own tools—a bridge between VLEs and learner‑owned ecosystems.
  • Towards an Ergonomics of Knowledge Systems (TEL) (2010; EC‑TEL/LNCS 6383) — Argued for ergonomics‑led TEL design, treating platforms as knowledge systems and analysing alignment with users, practices, and contexts.

Connection to current work. The emphasis on agency, stewardship, and practical authoring support in OER/PLEs directly informs my Human–AI interfaces strand (augmentative, human‑in‑the‑loop tools for knowledge work) and my MR for cultural heritage strand (care for place, stakeholder needs, and sustainable sharing practices).

Web Science & Social Media Analytics

Period: ~2009–2018 (with ongoing collaborations)

Focus. I study the web as a socio‑technical system—or, if you prefer, HCI at scale—with an emphasis on how platform design, social practice, and governance shape behaviour, privacy, trust/credibility, and participation. This work has been interdisciplinary by design, co‑supervising PhD students through Southampton’s Web Science DTC and collaborating with colleagues across Social Sciences, Law, Humanities, and beyond.

Themes & contributions.

  • Privacy decision‑making. Showed how people’s privacy choices online are shaped by social context and platform affordances, moving beyond simplistic attitude–behaviour framings to identify designable levers for respectful control.
  • Personal data models. Developed conceptual tools that clarify what counts as personal data and how it should be communicated—supporting transparency, informed consent, and individual agency.
  • Trust, influence & credibility. Examined how power and participation operate at scale (e.g., degrees of citizen power in news systems), how information spreads through hidden pathways as well as visible ones, and how these dynamics affect credibility signals and measurement.
  • Antisocial behaviour & participation risk. Brought perceptions of hostility and safety into models of technology acceptance and ongoing engagement on social platforms.

Working in Web Science was profoundly rewarding: the interdisciplinarycollaborations, exposure to diverse methodologies and epistemologies, and alternative academic practices shaped how I do research. Those lessons – about rigor across methods, and care for stakeholders and contexts – continue to inform my work today.

Selected publications (most relevant → earlier).

Connection to current work. This strand underpins my Human–AI work—where web‑scale concerns about trust, provenance, credibility, and participation recur in AI‑mediated information ecosystems—and sustains an HCI‑at‑scale mindset that I bring to mixed‑reality for cultural‑heritage institutions. That interdisciplinary perspective helps integrate playful MR experiences sensitively into fragile or contested sites by aligning gameplay, stewardship, and place‑specific values.

Open, Adaptive & Contextual Hypermedia (Early Career)

Period: ~1997–2005

Focus. My early career centred on interoperability and openness in hypermedia—standardising how components talk to one another, modelling structure and context across hypertext domains, and extending these ideas into adaptive and mixed‑reality settings. This began within the Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group (OHSWG) on the Open Hypermedia Protocol (OHP), and led to my first hypertext model, FOHM (Fundamental Open Hypertext Model), which became the basis for my PhD and subsequent systems work.

Themes & contributions.

  • From protocol to model (OHSWG → OHP → FOHM). Participation in the OHSWG’s effort to define a common protocol for open hypermedia led to the insight that a robust, domain‑spanning data model was the real foundation for interoperability. FOHM provided that common layer across navigational, spatial, and taxonomic hypertext.
  • Open adaptive hypermedia. We applied FOHM’s notions of context and behaviour to adaptive hypermedia, showing how a small set of open hypermedia structures can realise multiple adaptive techniques and support dynamic structure.
  • From model to mixed reality (Equator). After my PhD, I helped translate these ideas into practice within the EPSRC Equator programme. We built a lightweight contextual link server (often called Auld Linky/Leaky) that served FOHM structures over HTTP and filtered by context, demonstrating how open hypermedia could underpin locative information systems and early mixed‑reality narrative experiences.

Selected publications

  • FOHM: A Fundamental Open Hypertext Model (HT 2000) — Introduced a domain‑spanning data model (across navigational, spatial, and taxonomic hypertext) that became the core conceptual foundation for my subsequent work on interoperability and structure.
  • Towards Open Adaptive Hypermedia (AH 2002; LNCS 2347) — Demonstrated how FOHM’s context and behaviour can operationalise multiple adaptive techniques, showing a practical route from open hypermedia models to dynamic, user‑responsive structure.
  • Auld Leaky: A Contextual Open Hypermedia Link Server (OHS/SC/AH 2001; LNCS 2266) — Delivered a lightweight, HTTP‑based link server that serves FOHM structures and filters by context, providing the first working platform for contextual linking used across hypertext domains (including early narrative prototypes).
  • Navigational Hypertext Models for Physical Hypermedia Environments (HT 2004) — Extended model thinking into mixed‑reality settings, analysing how anchors, traversal, and display must adapt when links are situated in physical space, laying groundwork for later MR deployments.
  • Hypermedia Interoperability: Navigating the Information Continuum (PhD thesis, 2000) — Consolidated the information‑continuum perspective and formalised FOHM as the basis for cross‑domain interoperability, establishing the research trajectory pursued in later systems and studies.

Connection to later work. This programme established the structural and contextual mindset that runs through my research. FOHM’s cross‑domain view of structure influenced my later interactive narrative engines; OHP/FOHM’s interoperability concerns prefigure my Human–AI focus on malleable, human-focused software; and the Equator deployments seeded my long‑standing interest in mixed‑reality**—where openness, context, and sensitivity to place are critical.

PhD Students

In the last twenty years I have supervised over forty PhD students, and acted as an internal examiner for another forty students. I am based in the Data, Intelligence and Society (DAIS) group within Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, on the Highfield campus, with access to state‑of‑the‑art labs and a large, vibrant research community.

Current Students

  1. Jiajun Chen – Generative AI for historic textile patterns
  2. Luca Quicke – Geographical Imaginations and Virtual Worlds
  3. Ying Huang – AI-Powered Mixed Reality (MR) for Health Education
  4. Qianwen Lyu – Emergent Narratives and Prospective Story Sifting

Completed Students

  1. Lesia Tkacz (PhD, 2025) – The Impact of Paratext on Readers of Generative Literature: Human evaluation of generated text
  2. Ben Giordano (PhD, 2025) – The British Dance Hall (1918-1939) and Its Present-day Digital Commemoration
  3. Joey Jones (PhD, 2025) – The Authorial Burden: Embracing and Overcoming Complexity in Interactive Narrative Creation
  4. Yoan-Daniel Malinov (PhD, 2025) – Characterising Embodiment in Multi-Modal Play for Virtual Reality
  5. Ashwathy Revi – (PhD, 2024) – An Investigation into NLP Techniques for Generating Intelligent Narrative Feedback to Support IDN Authoring
  6. Frode Hegland – (PhD, 2024) – Visual Meta
  7. Simon Jonsson (PhD, 2022) – The Effect of Immediate Feedback and Difficulty Level on Learning and Engagement in a Spanish Learning Mobile Application
  8. Ryan Javanshir (PhD, 2022) – Revealing Structures in Transmedia Storytelling for the Purposes of Analysis and Classification
  9. Emma Craddock (PhD, 2021) – A New Approach to Categorising Personal Data to Increase Transparency Under the Obligation to Inform
  10. Justyna Lisinska (PhD, 2021) – How do populist supporters engage online?
  11. Fatima Asiri (PhD, 2021) – Unpacking Privacy Practices in SNSs: Users’ Protection Strategies to Enforce Privacy Boundaries
  12. Callum Spawforth (PhD, 2021) – Multiplayer Interactive Narrative Experiences: Understanding Player Interaction in Authored Non-Linear Narratives
  13. Adriana Wilde (PhD, 2021) – A Platform-Agnostic Model and Analysis of Learner Engagement within Peer-Supported Digital Environments: FutureLearn MOOCs and PeerWise
  14. Sofia Kitromili (PhD, 2021) – Authoring Digital Interactive Narratives
  15. Mark Anderson (PhD, 2021) – Sustainable Knowledge in Hypertext
  16. Vincent Marmion (PhD, 2021) – Exploring Identity Assurance as a Complex System
  17. Taghreed Alghamdi (PhD, 2021) – Blended MOOCs Acceptance and Use: A Cross-Cultural Study of the Factors Affecting Lecturers’ Use of bMOOCs
  18. Nick Bennett (PhD, 2020) – Data Mining Narratives of Social Space: Analysing Twitter, Census and POI Data to Extract the Changing Nature of Social Locations
  19. Nada Albunni (PhD, 2019) – The Arabic Online Public Sphere
  20. Rob Blair (PhD, 2018) – Attitudes of School Children to using Social Media for Non-Formal Learning
  21. Tom Blount (PhD, 2018) – Online Eristic Argumentation
  22. Tim O’Riordan (PhD, 2018) – Pedagogical Content Analysis applied to MOOC forums
  23. Brian Parkinson (PhD, 2018) – Personal Data and the Digitally Extended Self
  24. Fahad Almoqhim (PhD, 2017) – Building Tag Hierarchies Based on Co-occurrences and Lexico-Syntactic Patterns
  25. Jonathan Scott (PhD, 2017) – Enhancing Credibility of Citizen News
  26. Rikki Prince (PhD, 2017) – Sharing User Models Between Interactionally-Diverse Adaptive Educational Systems
  27. Nora Almuhanna (PhD, 2017) – Social Media Acceptance and Use under Risk: A Cross-Cultural Study of the Impact of Antisocial Behaviour on the Use of Twitter
  28. Phil Waddell (MPhil, 2017) -Investigating the role of Social Media Technologies in the political narratives of Global Justice Activists
  29. Syed Asim Jalal (PhD, 2015) – Educational Multimedia Adaptation for Power-Saving in Mobile Learning
  30. Muhammad Imran (PhD, 2015) – The Impact of Consolidating Web Based Social Networks on Trust Metrics and Expert Recomendation Systems
  31. Reuben Binns (PhD, 2015) – Openness for Privacy: Applying Open Approaches to Personal Data Challenges
  32. Areeb Alowisheq (PhD, 2014) – EXPRESS Resource-Oriented and RESTful Semantic Web Services
  33. Aristea Zafeiropoulou (PhD, 2014) – A Paradox of Privacy: Unravelling the Reasoning behind Online Location Sharing
  34. Norhidayah Azman (PhD, 2014) – Dark Retweets: An Investigation of Non-Conventional Retweeting Patterns
  35. Saad Alahmari (PhD, 2012) – Service Identification using Choreography and Model Transformations
  36. Ali Aseere (PhD, 2012) – A Voting-Based Agent System to Support Intelligent System for E-learning Scenarios
  37. Wen-Pin Chen (MPhil, 2012) – Design of a Scrutable Learning System
  38. Charlie Hargood (PhD, 2011) – Semiotic Term Expansion as the Basis for Thematic Models in Narrative Systems
  39. Clare Hooper (PhD, 2011) – Towards Designing More Effective Systems by Understanding User Experiences
  40. Asma Ounnas (PhD, 2010) – Enhancing the Automation of Forming Groups for Education with Semantics
  41. Mischa Tuffield (PhD, 2009) – Telling Your Story: A Tale of Autobiographical Metadata and the Semantic Web

(Btw – the image at the top of this page is from a demonstration memex built by Trevor Smith – you can watch his demo video here).

Welcome,

I’m David

I am Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK within the Data, Intelligence, and Society group in ECS. I am also Head of the Education Group within ECS with the goal of improving education across the whole of Electronics and Computer Science in a meaningful, healthy, and sustainable way. 

My research roots are in Hypertext, but my current interests are in Interactive Digital Narratives, Mixed Reality Games, and AI Knowledge Interfaces.

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