Ulrike Spierling

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.

Meeting the spirit of history

This paper describes a research and development project for a novel technology, making the conveyance of cultural heritage during a historic sightseeing tour a unique experience. The cornerstones of this system are mobile augmented reality, including a hybrid tracking approach, intelligent queries to pose complex questions about geographical and historical knowledge, as well as a story engine to interactively run a digital story. This system involves the user in a thrilling story while exploring the history and the attractions of the city.

Towards accessible authoring tools for interactive storytelling

This contribution presents and discusses Scenejo as an experimental platform for Interactive Digital Storytelling, focusing on the authoring process as initial viewpoint for its development. Special emphasis is on the construction of conversational threads for virtual actors using pattern matching, employing transition graph representations as the main interface for authoring. In the conclusion, the opportunities and challenges of graph structures are discussed.

Face-to-Face with your Assistant. Realization Issues of Animated User Interface Agents for Home Appliances

Abstract With the introduction of software agents and assistants, the concept of so-called social user interfaces evolved, incorporating natural language interaction, context awareness and anthropomorphic representations of visuals, scales, and degrees of freedom for interactions. Todays challenge is to build a suitable visualization architecture for anthropomorphic conversational user interfaces, and to design for the believable and appropriate inclusion of human attributes (such as emotions) in a face-to-face interaction. Integrated approaches to these tasks are presented here.

Scenejo – an interactive storytelling platform

Scenejo is an Interactive Storytelling platform, supporting both structured story lines and emergent behavior. Authoring is performed either at the level of a story graph or dialogue patterns. The Scenejo platform supports several artificial actors conversing with a number of real actors, representing the users in the system. Artificial actors are visualized as animated 3d characters, and actor responses are presented by speech synthesis in combination with non-verbal behavior.

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.

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.

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.

Production and Delivery of Interactive Narratives Based on Video Snippets

We propose digital audio/video streaming as highly expressive representation form for interactive storytelling on the web, in spite of wide-spread assumptions that pre-authored videos may reduce flexibility. To address the latter, we present our new end-user client for dynamic ad-hoc playback of video or audio snippets managed by a multi-agent conversational platform, as well as a way to include video (or pre-rendered animation) production in an iterative prototyping cycle tailored for that system.

CitizenTalk: application of chatbot infotainment to e-democracy

“CitizenTalk”, an applied research project at FH Erfurt, investigates the potential and challenges of interactive communication using chatbots as an innovative tool for involving citizens in public planning processes. This comprises research into the state of the art in virtual planning communication, as well as the technical possibilities of chatbot communication. We present the opportunities and limitations associated with the adoption of chatbot concepts and show future prospects offered by storytelling mechanisms. An authoring tool is presented together with a new scheme to control the communication process better than current chatbot technologies and approaches allow.