Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Writing manual code to script the behaviors of thousands of non-player characters in a computer role-playing game adventure has a tremendous negative impact on the quality of games and their entertainment level. Many games use shared custom scripts for background characters that produce repetitive and predictable behaviors. Game designers often need help from programmers when designing a game story and this can lead to lost productivity and a distorted design vision. ScriptEase is a tool that enables game designers to use to specify complex, non-repetitive entertaining behaviors for interactive characters, without writing code. This demonstration illustrates how entertaining ambient and perceptive behaviors can be easily and reliably inserted into BioWare Corp.’s Neverwinter Nights game stories.

Games and other forms of tabletop electronic entertainment are a natural application of the new multi-user multi-touch tabletop technology DiamondTouch [3]. Electronic versions of familiar tabletop games such as ping-pong or air hockey require simultaneous touch events that can be uniquely associated with different users. Multi-touch two-handed gestures useful for, e.g., rotating, stretching, capturing, or releasing also have natural applications for entertainment applications built on electronic tabletops. Here we show a set of games that are illustrative of the capabilities of an underlying authoring toolkit we call DTFlash. DTFlash is designed so that those familiar with Macromedia Flash authoring tools can add multi-user multi-touch gestures and behaviors to web-enabled games and other applications for the DiamondTouch table.

We describe a first prototype of a system for storytelling for high functioning children with autism. The system, based on the Story-Table developed by IRST-itc, is aimed at supporting a group of children in the activity of storytelling. The system is based on a unique multi-user touchable device (the MERL Diamond Touch) designed with the purpose of enforcing collaboration between users. The instructions were simplified in order to allow children with communication disabilities to learn and operate the story table. First pilot results are very encouraging. The children were enthusiastic about communicating through the ST and appeared to be able to learn to operate it with little difficulty.

The blogosphere refers to the social network of weblogs composed by bloggers and read and linked to by other bloggers. In this paper we suggest that this is a new type of collaborative entertainment in which emerging topics of shared interest are discussed and developed online. We introduce Tagsocratic, a system designed to facilitate the social interactions among bloggers. To do that, we use a novel agent-based architecture where agents interact in order to learn their respective topic competences. We describe the language games technique on which this architecture is based and our future work in this domain.

We introduce a new interaction model based on delegation where the visitor can signal her preferences during the visit by means of a graphical widget (called the ). The system takes into account such a feedback and selects/organizes the content according to users’ liking or disliking. The user model incrementally updates the information collected from users’ behaviour on the interface, and shows it to the visitor through the same widget which thus act as an output as well as an input device.

In this paper we present a multimedia information system based on an application server for the publishing of rich media content in museums and exhibitions. With this system it is possible to realize personalized and adaptive, knowledge based exhibitions and exhibition components for use in place and online. The system allows the presentation of digital content adjusted to the individual visitor’s interests. It supports different display devices from PDA’s up to projection screens and allows the integration of different localization techniques for location based information presentation. All these points lead to a completely new and exciting experience for the exhibition visitor. Furthermore, a special authoring tool is included that makes the creation and administration of exhibitions very easy for the museums.

In this paper, we present a game-like scenario that is based on a model of social group dynamics inspired by theories from the social sciences. The model is augmented by a model of proxemics that simulates the role of distance and spatial orientation in human-human communication. By means of proxemics, a group of human participants may signal other humans whether they welcome new group members to join or not. In this paper, we describe the results of an experiment we conducted to shed light on the question of how humans respond to such cues when shown by virtual humans.

Society needs humor, not just for entertainment. In the current business world, humor is considered to be so important that companies may hire humor consultants. Humor can be used “to criticize without alienating, to defuse tension or anxiety, to introduce new ideas, to bond teams, ease relationships and elicit cooperation”. As far as human-computer interfaces are concerned, in the future we will demand naturalness and effectiveness that require the incorporation of models of possibly all human cognitive capabilities, including the handling of humor [1]. There are many practical settings where computational humor will add value. Among them there are: business world applications (such as advertisement, e-commerce, etc.), general computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction, increase in the friendliness of natural language interfaces, educational and edutainment systems. Not necessarily applications need to emphasize interactivity. For instance there are important prospects for humor in automatic information presentation. In the Web age presentations will become more and more flexible and personalized and will require humor contributions for electronic commerce developments (e.g. product promotion, getting selective attention, help in memorizing names etc) more or less as it happened in the world of advertisement within the old broadcast communication.