Paolo Petta

The IRIS Network of Excellence: Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling

Interactive Storytelling is a major endeavour to develop new media which could offer a radically new user experience, with a potential to revolutionise digital entertainment. European research in Interactive Storytelling has played a leading role in the development of the field, and this creates a unique opportunity to strengthen its position even further by structuring collaboration between some of its main actors. IRIS (Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling) aims at creating a virtual centre of excellence that will be able to progress the understanding of fundamental aspects of Interactive Storytelling and the development of corresponding technologies.

Appraisal for a character-based story-world

Dramatic story-worlds, i.e., simulations inhabited by software actors for enacting (not necessarily explicitly anticipated) dramatically interesting plots, require situated software agents with emotional competences. The operationalisation of concepts from appraisal theories of emotion can contribute to providing flexible autonomous roleplayers for character-based approaches that reduce the required external macro-level control.

Emotions and Agents

The encounter between emotion research and agent-based technology is multifaceted. One the one hand, results from emotion research start to serve as role model from nature, providing inspirations for technical design criteria for individual agents at the micro level and agent groups and societies at the macro level as well as the sophisticated linkages in between them. On the other hand, they are of immediate impact in important aspects of human-agent interaction and effective social cooperation between humans and conversational interfaces. In this broad survey, we offer an appetising selection of results from different areas of emotion research.

The invisible person: advanced interaction using an embedded interface

In this paper we describe an advanced user interface enabling even playing games in an immersive virtual environment. There are no common input devices, users presence in the environment, movements, and body postures are the available tools for interaction. Furthermore, a publicly accessible installation in the Vienna Museum of Technology implementing such an advanced environment is described. In this installation computers are completely hidden, and it is one of the most popular exhibits in the museum, which has been accessed by more than 200,000 visitors since September 1999.

ON THE NATURE OF ENGINEERING SOCIAL ARTIFICIAL COMPANIONS

The literature on social agents has put forward a number of requirements that social agents need to fulfill. In this paper we analyze the kinds of reasons and motivations that lie behind the statement of these requirements. In a second part of the paper, we look at how one can go about engineering the social agents. We introduce a general language in which to express dialogue rules and some tools that support the development of dialogue systems.

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

European research and development of intelligent information agents: the agentlink perspective

The vast amount of heterogeneous information sources available in the Internet demands advanced solutions for acquiring, mediating, and maintaining relevant information for the common user. The impacts of data, system, and semantic heterogeneity on the information overload of the user are manifold and especially due to potentially significant differences in data modeling, data structures, content representations using ontologies and vocabularies, query languages and operations to retrieve, extract, and analyse information in the appropriate context. The impacts of the increasing globalisation on the information overload encompass the tedious tasks of the user to determine and keep track of relevant information sources, to efficiently deal with different levels of abstractions of information modeling at sources, and to combine partially relevant information from potentially billions of sources. A special type of intelligent software agents [92],[36],[95], so called information agents, is supposed to cope with these difficulties associated with the information overload of the user. This implies its ability to semantically broker information [82] by providing pro-active resource discovery, resolving the information impedance of information consumers and providers in the Internet, and offering value-added information services and products to the user or other agents. In subsequent sections we briefly introduce the reader to the notion of such type of agents as well as one of the prominent European forums for research on and development of these agents, the AgentLink special interest group on intelligent information agents. This book includes presentations of advanced systems of information agents and solution approaches to different problems in the domain that have been developed jointly by members of this special interest group in respective working groups.

Towards a Serious Game for Trauma Treatment

Serious games deliver interactive worlds in support of a wide range of application areas. Addressing the current paucity of scientific empirical studies in game-based psychotherapy, we present a principled concept for the design and deployment of a Trauma Treatment Game aimed at the support of individualised interventions to children suffering from childhood trauma. Focusing on the particular methodological challenges of IT-based psycho-therapeutic support, we detail a domain-general staged process that is fully embedded in a scaffolding of validation and evaluation assessments. We motivate the structural decomposition, explain the nature and requirements of quality insurance measures, identify suitable instruments for their implementation, and specify success criteria and contingency measures.

Specification of an open architecture for interactive storytelling

This article introduces OPARIS, an OPen ARchitecture for Interactive Storytelling, which aims at facilitating and fostering the integration of various and heterogeneous Interactive Storytelling components. It is based on a modular decomposition of functionalities and a specification of the various messages that different modules exchange with each other.

Ethics in Emotion-Oriented Systems: The Challenges for an Ethics Committee

The development of emotion-oriented systems has the potential to raise a range of ethical issues, not all of which were clearly understood at the inception of the project. This chapter discusses these issues and details the practical measures taken and the challenges faced in addressing them. An ethical audit revealed a lack of consistency in ethical procedures across the institutions and disciplines involved in the network, and HUMAINE established its own ethics committee to offer ethical advice and scrutiny when required. In addition, space was provided within the project for discussion of ethical issues – a process that allowed the emergence of a wider understanding of the issues themselves and of the sensitivities of different disciplines and users to them.