Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Tools, such as Macromedia Director and Flash which are commonly used in the development of interactive stories, are based upon linear means of representation i.e. timelines, reflecting their evolution from animation packages. In the development of INSCAPE, however, which is a tool dedicated to the creation of interactive stories, we have been able to readdress the notion of visual scenario representation for interactive stories through the development of a ‘Story Editor‘ component which acts as a means of organising story assets and presenting story structures as coherent patterns of information. This paper describes the process which has resulted in the development of a Story Editor component which will be released in INSCAPE’s Beta application at the end of 2007. It outlines the theoretical grounding of this work as well as providing a description of the design approach and its implications for the further development of interactive storytelling authoring tools.

In Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS),new design processes are needed for authors to fully embrace the emergent properties of this dynamic novel medium. As a counterpart to traditional explicit authoring in storytelling, “implicit creation” is introduced as a conceptual framework. By describing the development steps of a specific IDS application – the Killer Phrase game – and starting out with explicit methods, the conditions for adding implicit creation are discussed, which lead to suggestions for future research.

We present Wide Ruled, an authoring tool for the creation of generative stories. It is based on the Universe author-goal-based model of story generation, and extends this model by providing support for reader interactivity, episodic memory elements, and an extensive graphical interface that is aimed at authors with little or no experience with computer programming and artificial intelligence planning techniques. The design of the interface is based around common interface conventions, narrative terminology, and step-by-step guidance through the creation of complex plan preconditions and actions. We also present initial user evaluation of this work-in-progress, which shows how our tool can be used by those with varying technical backgrounds to author dynamic stories with our tool. This feedback also suggests potential improvements of the interface to the underlying story representation and generation model.

is an on-line multi-player strategy game aimed at education of high-school students in economics, politics, and media studies. The essential feature of the game is that players face various simulated scenarios and crises addressing contemporary key issues of the unified Europe. These scenarios are branching and can evolve in a parallel manner. In this paper, we present a technique for specifying plots of these scenarios, which underpins the story manager of . The technique is based on a modification of Petri Nets. We also detail one particular scenario concerning the current crisis in Darfur. On a general level this paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of implementation of Petri Nets in virtual storytelling.

Storytelling capabilities are vital aspect of a tour guide. In this paper, we present a mobile tour guide that emulates a real guide’s behaviour by presenting stories based on the user’s interests, its own interests, its belief and its current memory activation. This research moves away from the concept of a guide that recites facts about places or events towards a guide that utilises improvisational storytelling techniques. Contrasting views and personality are achieved with an inclusion of emotional memories containing the guide’s ideology and its past experiences.

Thanks to the technological advances in the last ten years, the recreation of 3D virtual worlds is becoming increasingly popular in several application fields. Desktop virtual reality is one of the best ways of reaching a good number of users through this technology. With the aim of improving the development of desktop virtual reality applications and increasing the relevance of the virtual experience, we defined the (VRF). This framework supports the creation of interactive systems for personalized and group guided tours in virtual worlds. The VRF can incorporate functionalities including context-sensitive information that a virtual guide will tell a user or group of users in a personalized manner. User interaction with the environment and with the intelligent virtual guides will lead to changes in the story told during the tour. In this paper we describe the Virtual Alhambra Project, which was the project that brought the VRF into being.

The idea behind 3D multi-user worlds is to use virtual reality techniques to allow several people to “exist” and play in the same virtual environment. In this way, technologies around non verbal behavior: voice and body movement are essential to coordinate "speech acts", actions with other partners or objects, to share space (localization, displacement, proxemy) and to improve the awareness, telepresence... Our studies are mainly centered on the non verbal behavior in small groups and on command gestures. Our aim is to carry out some experiences and transfer the results in design of a Storytelling Collaborative Virtual Environment (SCVE) without intrusive devices. Briefly, this paper presents our approach to design digital storytelling game.

A typical present-day virtual actor is able to store episodes in an manner, which does not allow for reconstructing the actor’s personal stories. This paper proposes a virtual RPG actor with a episodic memory, which allows for this reconstruction. The paper presents the memory architecture, overviews the prototype implementation, presents a benchmark for the efficiency of the memory measurement, and details the conducted tests.

Virtual agents, to be expressive, not only need algorithms for displaying the subtleties of human behaviour, but also require environments and tools so that people can author them. Because powerful algorithms are sometimes difficult to author, a compromise has to be found between algorithmic sophistication and authorability. Our approach for providing expressive characters at the behavioural level is based on such a compromise. This paper provides a model for describing behaviours which is author focused, while enabling some interesting algorithmic features such as parallelism and inter-agent coordination. The model has been implemented and simulation results are displayed.

This paper considers the problem of evaluating interactive narrative and discusses the storification process through which a narrative is internalised. It establishes the range of roles that a user may take, and argues that the participant/non-participant distinction has a key role in storification. An experiment carried out as part of a larger test of a double appraisal approach to the creation of more dramatic characters is discussed. The results show that spectators and participants mark different stories as the most interesting, showing that this role difference does indeed impact their assessment of a narrative experience. The implications for story evaluation are discussed.