Isabel Machado

TEATRIX: Virtual Environment for Story Creation

This paper describes TEATRIX; a learning environment designed to help children, and their teachers, in the whole process of collaborative story creation. TEATRIX provides an environment where both drama and story creation are merged into one medium providing a form of collaborative makebelieve for children. While creating a story TEATRIX allows the children to interact with each other in a distributed 3D environment, by means of their chosen characters. Each character is an intelligent software agent living in the world of the story: the theatre stage. Characters that are not controlled by children act autonomously according to the actions and goals set up by their role in the story. The roles in the story are based on the work by Vladimir Propp on folk tales and can be chosen from a set that includes a villain, a hero, a princess, a helper, etc. Children not only set up the scene for the development of the play and its characters, but also do the whole performance. TEATRIX is being evaluated in a Computer Integrated Classroom (CiC) environment which is part of an EU funded project (the NIMIS project).

Heroes, villians, magicians, …: dramatis personae in a virtual story creation environment

One difficulty in creating synthetic characters for interactive stories is that these characters must convey their role in the story in a believable way. However, the relation between believability, on one side, and the role a character plays in a drama, on the other, has not yet been fully addressed. In this paper we will present a view on how to develop believable synthetic characters whose behaviour is based on a set of predefined functions (Propps functions) associated with the role they play in the story. To illustrate the approach, we will present a collaborative virtual environment, Teatrix, designed for children to build their own stories-fairy tales. In Teatrix, virtual actors play roles (such as villain, hero, magician, etc), which are functional for the development of the story. Such roles have pre-defined goals and plans, allowing the story to flow and climax situations to arise. Teatrixis already in use by children ages between 7 and 9, in the context of a Computer-Integrated Classroom scenario.

Vincent, an Autonomous Pedagogical Agent for On-the-Job Training

Animated pedagogical agents are a promising new way to motivate learners that interact with learning environments. However, the majority of the animated agents lack in their autonomy from the learning environment, that is, most of the animated agents are fully embedded in their respective learning environments. In this paper we consider the autonomy of pedagogical agents in two ways: first its autonomy in relation to the control of a user and, and second, its autonomy in relation to the environment. We argue that, to achieve reusability, these two types of autonomy should be considered when developing animated pedagogical agents. To support this argument, we describe a Webbased pedagogical agent called Vincent that embeds these two types of autonomy. Vincent not only combines a set of sensors and actors establishing a communication through messages with several external learning environments, but also determines the best feedback to provide to the learners, having a set of visual and audio behaviors that correspond to emotional attitudes.

A cognitive approach to affective user modeling

This paper proposes a framework for cognitive-based affective user modeling. Such framework relies on the idea that, to model affect in user models, one can use the situations experienced by the user as well as the observable behaviour of the user. These situations and behaviours, when interpreted under the light of a cognitive theory of emotions, will allow us to make inferences on the possible affective states of the user. Such type of approach will be here called cognitive-based affective user modeling. To describe the framework we will use a cognitive theory of emotions (the Ortony, Clore and Collins theory of emotions) as the basis for the representation of the affective states of the user. We will also illustrate the use of this modelling in the context of a virtual theatre, where children engage in collaborative story creation.

Is the wolf angry or... just hungry

In this paper we will discuss different types of control over synthetic characters in interactive stories. We will argue that, to attain a deeper and more engaging control, in certain conditions, users should be able to inspect, disclose, and modify the characters minds. To illustrate this idea, we will present a collaborative virtual environment called {\it Teatrix}, designed for children to build their own stories - fairy tales. In {\it Teatrix}, virtual actors play roles (such as: villain, hero, etc.) and may be controlled either by children or by the system. {\it Teatrix} allows children to go into the minds of the characters through a special tool named {\it “Hot Seating”}. {\it Teatrix} is already in use by children ages between 7 and 9 in the context of a Computer integrated Classroom (CiC) scenario installed in a school. The initial evaluations show that the use of the “Hot Seatin” tool is a fundamental element for children to feel in control of their characters and thus stay in character for their virtual performances.

Bringing drama into a virtual stage

This paper describes a collaborative virtual environment, Teatrix, developed with the aim of bringing drama activities into a virtual stage. Drama activities and story telling play important roles in children development. Based on this premise and also on real classroom activities, we developed Teatrix as a collaborative virtual environment, where both drama and story creation are merged into a unique medium providing a form of collaborative make-believe for children. In this paper we will focus on the design, architecture and preliminary results of Teatrix, as well as on the future steps of the research.

Real Characters in Virtual Stories

Interactive experience in a virtual world. We take the line that children need to be both engaged in the action through role play and given the opportunity to reflect on the significance of their actions to understand something of their significance in terms of both the narrative and its ethical significance. This requires a system that incorporates the childrens actions into the unfolding plot. We introduce the Support And Guidance Architecture (SAGA), a plug-in architecture for guiding and supporting childrens interactive story creation activities. This is illustrated with reference to Teatrix, a collaborative virtual environment for story creation, which provides the children with the means for collaboratively creating their story on a virtual stage.

You Cannot Use My Broom! I'm the Witch, You're the Prince: Collaboration in a Virtual Dramatic Game

In this paper we discuss how collaboration issues are addressed in the context of Teatrix, a virtual environment aiming at providing the children with the means for collaboratively creating a story on a virtual stage. The children create stories using a set of pre-defined scenes and dramatis personae - characters that have specific roles in the play, which they control to a certain extent). Each child expects the story to evolve in reaction to her/his characters actions and the overall story emerges from the collaboration of different children. Based on this premise we conducted some evaluation experiences, in order to assess to what extent Teatrix promoted collaboration and what types of collaboration were particularly elicited by the application.

1, 2, 3 .... Action! Directing real actors and virtual characters

The new interactive ways of storytelling, which can be realised as interactive narratives, virtual storytelling, interactive fiction, interactive drama, are often regarded as a significant break from traditional storytelling methods. In this paper we focus on the role of a person in an interactive storytelling context who facilitates the story construction process, the Director. The term Director is often associated with roles such as theatre director, stage director, film director or even television director. The meaning usually assigned to this concept is of someone who: ”oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a play by unifying various endeavours and aspects of production. The director’s function is to ensure the quality and completeness of a theatrical product”. In our research, the concept of a Director is extended and does not only have the role of supervising the acting in a play where every actor knows his/her role in a well-known plot, but to supervise the role being played by a set of autonomous virtual characters and to provide support to the users that engage in the story by controlling and commanding virtual actors. In our view, our concept of a Director is challenging because its role is vital in the sense that it does not only supervise a set of synthetic characters but has to accommodate the choices made by the users, within our context children, and at the same time guarantee that the coherence of the story is maintained.

One for All and All in One

For the past few years several research teams have been developing intelligent learning environments (ILE) based on multi-agent architectures. For such type of architectures to be possible, the agents must have specific roles in the architecture and must be able to communicate in between them. To handle such needs, we have established a generic multi-agent architecture — the Pedagogical Agents Communication Framework (PACF). In PACF a set of agents were defined, their roles established, and their communication infrastructure built. Such communication infrastructure is based on a subset of the KQML language. There are two main general agents in PACF: the Server that acts both as a facilitator in the KQML sense and as an application-independent name server; and a Learner Modelling Server (LMS). The LMS can be used by several applications (composed by several agents) and each one can adapt the modelling strategy to its needs through the parameterisation of three configuration files: one that provides the application domain structure and the others the learner modelling strategies. Through this parameterisation the applications define how the LMS will model their learners. The LMS keeps one single database for all the learners being modelled by all the agents, allowing different applications to access to the same learner model simultaneously. These different applications can share parts of the learner models provided that they use the same domain ontology in the modelling process. This architecture has been used in a Web based distance learning scenario with two different ILEs.