Authoring Multi-Actor Behaviors in Crowds With Diverse Personalities

Multi-actor simulation is critical to cinematic content creation, disaster and security simulation, and interactive entertainment. A key challenge is providing an appropriate interface for authoring high-fidelity virtual actors with featurerich control mechanisms capable of complex interactions with the environment and other actors. In this chapter, we present work that addresses the problem of behavior authoring at three levels: Individual and group interactions are conducted in an event-centric manner using parameterized behavior trees, social crowd dynamics are captured using the OCEAN personality model, and a centralized automated planner is used to enforce global narrative constraints on the scale of the entire simulation. We demonstrate the benefits and limitations of each of these approaches and propose the need for a single unifying construct capable of authoring functional, purposeful, autonomous actors which conform to a global narrative in an interactive simulation

Usage of instructional multimedia to enhance interactivity through Web-based learning in P--12 settings

The purpose of this study was to analyze multiple media as instructional technologies used to enhance interactivity in a web-based environment and to illustrate the potential for improved learning with interactive multimedia. This study identified instructional media that teachers use, the level of engagement with the media, and determined that there was a correlation between the types and use of instructional media and cognitive level of learning.;Research shows that web-based instruction has the ability to engage learners in real-world tasks. This type of authentic learning has the potential to promote higher order thinking provided students are properly skilled in the use of instructional technologies and confident in the use of the web. This study examines the types and use of instructional media integrated in web-based lessons of P-12 study participants.;The correlation between types and use of instructional media and cognitive levels of learning are examined with Bloom\u27s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and Tomei\u27s Instructional Technology Taxonomy. These two taxonomies were customized to reflect integrated instructional media and associated instructional strategies based on web-units completed by study participants.;An in-depth analysis of an intensity sampling who exhibited high use of active instructional media was conducted to corroborate results gathered through quantitative methods, to add validity to this study, and to examine participants\u27 perceptions of instructional media and their use.;The study shows a correlation between the types and use of specific instructional media. Specific instructional media were integrated more frequently at low levels on each taxonomy than others. In-depth analysis corroborated findings and analysis of emergent themes yielded additional insight regarding the types and ways in which instructional media were integrated

Teacher and child talk in active learning and whole-class contexts : some implications for children from economically less advantaged home backgrounds

This paper reports the experiences of 150 children and six primary teachers when active learning pedagogies were introduced into the first year of primary schools. Although active learning increased the amount of talk between children, those from socio-economically advantaged homes talked more than those from less advantaged homes. Also, individual children experienced very little time engaged in high-quality talk with the teacher, despite the teachers spending over one-third of their time responding to children's needs and interests. Contextual differences, such as the different staffing ratios in schools and pre-schools,may affect how well the benefits of active learning transfer from preschool contexts into primary schools. Policy-makers and teachers should pay particular attention to the implications of this for the education of children from economically less advantaged home backgrounds

Towards a crowdsourced solution for the authoring bottleneck in interactive narratives

Interactive Storytelling research has produced a wealth of technologies that can be employed to create personalised narrative experiences, in which the audience takes a participating rather than observing role. But so far this technology has not led to the production of large scale playable interactive story experiences that realise the ambitions of the field. One main reason for this state of affairs is the difficulty of authoring interactive stories, a task that requires describing a huge amount of story building blocks in a machine friendly fashion. This is not only technically and conceptually more challenging than traditional narrative authoring but also a scalability problem. This thesis examines the authoring bottleneck through a case study and a literature survey and advocates a solution based on crowdsourcing. Prior work has already shown that combining a large number of example stories collected from crowd workers with a system that merges these contributions into a single interactive story can be an effective way to reduce the authorial burden. As a refinement of such an approach, this thesis introduces the novel concept of Crowd Task Adaptation. It argues that in order to maximise the usefulness of the collected stories, a system should dynamically and intelligently analyse the corpus of collected stories and based on this analysis modify the tasks handed out to crowd workers. Two authoring systems, ENIGMA and CROSCAT, which show two radically different approaches of using the Crowd Task Adaptation paradigm have been implemented and are described in this thesis. While ENIGMA adapts tasks through a realtime dialog between crowd workers and the system that is based on what has been learned from previously collected stories, CROSCAT modifies the backstory given to crowd workers in order to optimise the distribution of branching points in the tree structure that combines all collected stories. Two experimental studies of crowdsourced authoring are also presented. They lead to guidelines on how to employ crowdsourced authoring effectively, but more importantly the results of one of the studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the Crowd Task Adaptation approach