Ido Iurgel

Setting the scene: playing digital director in interactive storytelling and creation

Abstract Interactive digital storytelling promises to be a new artistic discipline. But what does the artwork look like? And how much control does the artist have over the final result? By searching for the right answers, we draw several approaches from diverse fields such as filmmaking, game design, autonomous agents, psychology, and narrative intelligence. We first give a definition of interactive storytelling that includes a scope between authorship and emergent narrative, and present two example projects with different emphases. Then, we introduce a multi-level concept for an experimental stage that can be used to explore interactive storytelling at varying degrees of flexibility versus predetermination. Instead of inventing the ultimate virtual narrator, we suggest developing layers of run-time engines that allow authors to work with directions on each single layer separately—from selecting high-level dramatic structures down to directing animated actors. The concept of underlying models at each level is explained in detail by the example of a story model implementation. Further, we show variations of level adjustments causing graded degrees of semi-autonomy. First results of this experimental stage are presented, and the primary future tasks are pointed out.

From Another Point of View: Art-E-Fact

This paper presents the EU funded project Art-E-Fact and goes into details of the dialogue management module, showing that a directed graph approach is appropriate if certain measures are taken. In this project, a software environment with designated authoring tools is being developed for the creation of narrative, interactive discussion groups of virtual characters. Interaction comprises chatting with a keyboard and the use of specialized devices, e.g. gesture recognition. Target use groups are visitors of a museum who will get interpretations of works of art form different points of view.

Cyranus – An Authoring Tool for Interactive Edutainment Applications

This paper presents the authoring tool Cyranus, which implements novel authoring methods for highly interactive edutainment applications. Both concluded work and ongoing and future issues are presented. Among the concluded work, a framework is described that integrates a hierarchic transition network with non-graph based methods, in particular with a rule-based system. This facilitates the authoring process considerably, and enhances the power to control the logic of an application.

Just Talking about Art - Creating Virtual Storytelling Experiences in Mixed Reality

This paper reports on interdisciplinary findings and first results of the ongoing EU-funded R&D project ”art-E-fact”. Within the project, a generic platform for building a particular genre of Mixed Reality interactive storytelling experiences is under development. It enables artists to script interactive dialogues for multiple virtual characters and a human participant, as well as to freely design any interaction devices and modalities. The interactive play ”Just talking about art” will be illustrated as an example. With an edutainment motivation, it introduces virtual characters positioned next to real art pieces in an exhibition. These characters discuss art, while prompting visitors for their opinions and questions. They also provide entertainment by enacting personal conflicts. The content and design issues of the play will be shown as one representative example of what can be built with the art-E-fact platform. The main technical components for the direction of interactive dialogues are explained, and authoring issues are pointed out.

Virtual Human: Storytelling and Computer Graphics for a Virtual Human Platform

This paper describes the usage of Computer Graphics and Interactive, Digital Storytelling Concepts within the Virtual Human project and its technical platform. Based on a brief overview of the Virtual Human approach, global aims and first R&D results, the Virtual Human platform is introduced. Hereby, methods and concepts for the authoring environment, the narration engine and the avalon player as rendering platform are provided as well as an overview of the Direction and Player Markup Language used for interfaces purposes between these components. Finally, our current Virtual Human demonstrator recently presented at CeBIT 2004 in Hannover using these methods and concepts is described and further R&D activities are pointed out within a brief summary and outlook.

Pre-conference demo workshop “little red cap”: the authoring process in interactive storytelling

Over the last several years, conferences in the field of interactive entertainment have showcased numerous presentations concerning concepts and technology for Interactive Digital Storytelling: runtime systems, such as story engines, intelligent / autonomous agents, drama managers and conversational systems. They focus on solutions to the problem of combining dramatic storytelling with user interactivity. In contrast to the many technical contributions concerning runtime performance, few discussions have been initiated about the question of how a new breed of “interactive storytellers” would create concrete original artefacts with the proposed systems. In our opinion, the authoring process is likely to be a serious bottleneck for generating innovative products in the future.

Adaptation of Mesh Morphing Techniques for Avatars Used in Web Applications

Multilingual 3D avatars combine rich emotion with multilingual speech gesticulation. They require complex animation. The most performing facial animation engines for avatars have been developed using morphing techniques. Unfortunately, these techniques cannot be directly utilized to generate animation through the Internet. The information needed to make them work is over the capacities of the connections of most Internet users. This article presents a solution to this problem. We have elaborated the adaptation of a very performing multilingual face animation engine to fit it into the Internet. We also evaluate the pros and the cons of such an adaptation from the animation quality perspective.

CREACTOR --- An Authoring Framework for Virtual Actors

We present ongoing work on CREACTOR, a research oriented authoring system for virtual actors. CREACTOR will provide a framework for experimenting with different authoring processes and AI-technologies. The main goal is the creation of virtual actors that can be employed for the development of 3D movies, following the analogy of a real director who can issue a variety of commands to real actors. Here, we present a concept called AI-tweening: employing AI to create in-between behaviors.

Design Issues for Conversational User Interfaces: Animating and Controlling 3D Faces

Software agents and assistants, together with their adequate visual representations, lead to so-called social user interfaces, incorporating natural language interaction, context awareness and anthropomorphic avatars. Today’s challenge is to build a suitable visualization architecture for anthropomorphic conversational user interfaces, and to design believable and appropriate face-to-face interactions, including human attributes, such as emotions. An integrated approach to these tasks is presented.

Transactions on Edutainment X

This journal subline serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, theories, emerging technologies, empirical investigations, state-of-the-art methods, and tools in all different genres of edutainment, such as game-based learning and serious games, interactive storytelling, virtual learning environments, VR-based education, and related fields. It covers aspects from educational and game theories, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and systems design. This special issue consists of two parts: the first one features original research papers on interactive digital storytelling in the applied context of edutainment; the second part contains a selection of revised and expanded best papers from the 4th eLearning Baltics (eLBa 2011) conference. The papers on digital storytelling have been split into sections on theory, technology, and case studies; the eLBA 2011 conference papers deal with technology and applications, case studies and mobile applications, and game-based learning and social media