The IRIS Network of Excellence:: Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling

Abstract. 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

Affective interactive narrative in the CALLAS Project

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CoLocScribe: A Media Space for Information Disclosure in Storytelling

Digital storytelling of remote social interaction, where the situation of a remote group distributed over two locations is captured and a story is generated for later retrieval, can provide valuable insight into the structure and processes in a group. Yet, capturing these situations is a challenge—both from a technical perspective, and from a social perspective. In this paper we present CoLocScribe: a concept and prototype of an advanced media space featuring ubiquitous computing technology for capturing remote social interaction as well as a study of its use providing valuable feedback for the captured persons as well as input for the authors

Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications

Work on expressive speech synthesis has long focused on the expression of basic emotions. In recent years, however, interest in other expressive styles has been increasing. The research presented in this paper aims at the generation of a storytelling speaking style, which is suitable for storytelling applications and more in general, for applications aimed at children. Based on an analysis of human storytellers' speech, we designed and implemented a set of prosodic rules for converting "neutral" speech, as produced by a text-to-speech system, into storytelling speech. An evaluation of our storytelling speech generation system showed encouraging results

‘IMPLICIT CREATION’ – NON-PROGRAMMER CONCEPTUAL MODELS FOR AUTHORING IN INTERACTIVE DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) constitutes a research field that emerged from several areas of art, creation and computer science. It inquires technologies and possible artefacts that allow ‘highly-interactive’ experiences of digital worlds with compelling stories. However, the situation for story creators approaching ‘highly-interactive’ storytelling is complex. There is a gap between the available technology, which requires programming and prior knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, and established models of storytelling, which are too linear to have the potential to be highly interactive. This thesis reports on research that lays the ground for bridging this gap, leading to novel creation philosophies in future work. A design research process has been pursued, which centred on the suggestion of conceptual models, explaining a) process structures of interdisciplinary development, b) interactive story structures including the user of the interactive story system, and c) the positioning of human authors within semi-automated creative processes. By means of ‘implicit creation’, storytelling and modelling of simulated worlds are reconciled. The conceptual models are informed by exhaustive literature review in established neighbouring disciplines. These are a) creative principles in different storytelling domains, such as screenwriting, video game writing, role playing and improvisational theatre, b) narratological studies of story grammars and structures, and c) principles of designing interactive systems, in the areas of basic HCI design and models, discourse analysis in conversational systems, as well as game- and simulation design. In a case study of artefact building, the initial models have been put into practice, evaluated and extended. These artefacts are a) a conceived authoring tool (‘Scenejo’) for the creation of digital conversational stories, and b) the development of a serious game (‘The Killer Phrase Game’) as an application development. The study demonstrates how starting out from linear storytelling, iterative steps of ‘implicit creation’ can lead to more variability and interactivity in the designed interactive story. In the concrete case, the steps included abstraction of dialogues into conditional actions, and creating a dynamic world model of the conversation. This process and artefact can be used as a model illustrating non-programmer approaches to ‘implicit creation’ in a learning process. Research demonstrates that the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling still has to be further advanced until general creative principles can be fully established, which is a long-term endeavour, dependent upon environmental factors. It also requires further technological developments. The gap is not yet closed, but it can be better explained. The research results build groundwork for education of prospective authors. Concluding the thesis, IDS-specific creative principles have been proposed for evaluation in future work

SportsAnno: what do you think?

The automatic summarisation of sports video is of growing importance with the increased availability of on-demand content. Consumers who are unable to view events live often have a desire to watch a summary which allows then to quickly come to terms with all that has happened during a sporting event. Sports forums show that it is not only summaries that are desirable but also the opportunity to share one’s own point of view and discuss the opinions with a community of similar users. In this paper we give an overview of the ways in which annotations have been used to augment existing visual media. We present SportsAnno, a system developed to summarise World Cup 2006 matches and provide a means for open discussion of events within these matches

Using interactive storytelling approach in science education

This research was aimed to develop interactive multimedia software and to determine its competencies. This Computer Aided Learning (CAL) was established based on National Pre-School Curriculum, 2006, Education Ministry of Malaysia. This Computer Aided Learning (CAL) focused on Science subject with the theme of "Explore the Space" for pre-school level. The development of educational multimedia software with animated story approach making the learning process more fun as well as enable teachers to convey knowledge in easier way. Furthermore, this study refers to the learning theories, for instance, behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism as well as scaffolding. This software package was developed using ADDIE methodology and Adobe Director 11 software as the base. The interactive animated story approach used in the exploration module includes stories of 9 planets in the solar system; Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Early analysis was done in 10 preschools managed by the Education Ministry of Malaysia. From the analysis, it was found that the current Science teaching is teacher-oriented. This contributes to the development of the children with criterion such as passive, lack of confidence to speak and depend solely on their teachers

Towards data-driven drama management : issues in data collection and annotation

One of the key questions in the design and development of interactive drama is structuring an experience for participants such that an engaging, coherent narrative is presented while enabling a high degree of perceived meaningful interactivity. This paper proposes a new approach to the design of intelligent drama managers (DMs) where DM strategies are learned from a corpus of data collected from pen-and-paper RPG game sessions with expert human game masters. In particular, this paper focuses on the issues relating to the collection and annotation of relevant data from recorded gameplay sessions.peer-reviewe