Narrative guidance of interactivity

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1995.Includes bibliographical references.by Tinsley Azariah Galyean, III.Ph.D

Mobile Devices for Early Literacy Intervention and Research with Global Reach

Extensive work focuses on the uses of technology at scale for post-literate populations (e.g., MOOC, Learning Games, LMS’s). Little attention is afforded to non-literate populations, particularly in the developing world. This paper presents an approach using mobile devices with the ultimate goal to reach 770 million people. We developed a novel platform with a cloud backend to deliver educational content to over a thousand marginalized children in different countries:specifically, in remote villages without schools, urban slums with overcrowded schools, and at-risk, rural schools. Here we describe the theoretical basis of our system and results from case studies in three educational contexts. This model will help researchers and designers understand how mobile devices can help children acquire basic skills and aid each other’s learning when the benefit of teachers is limited or non-existent.Italian Development CouncilMRP FoundationRoanoke County School

Multi-level Control for Animated Autonomous Agents: Do the Right Thing... Oh, Not That...

This paper focuses on how to provide multiple levels of control for autonomous animated characters for use in interactive story systems. Much has been written on the problems of action-selection for autonomous agents and robots [Maes90, Blumberg94, Brooks86]. Some work has focused on the specific problems of building autonomous animated characters [Reynolds87, Tu94]. Less work, however, has focused on the problem of integrating external control into autonomous agent architectures, particularly as it relates to the types of control needed for characters in interactive story systems. It is this problem which is the topic of this paper and much of our research in general. This paper is organized as follows. We begin by identifying 4 different levels of control and discuss the forms the control may take. We then describe how a particular autonomous agent architecture, developed by Blumberg and Galyean, supports these different levels of control. Lastly, we describe the use of these ideas in 2 systems. Details of the underlying architecture may be found in [Blumberg95

Multi-Level Direction of Autonomous Creatures for Real-Time Virtual Environments

There have been several recent efforts to build behavior-based autonomous creatures. While competent autonomous action is highly desirable, there is an important need to integrate autonomy with "directability". In this paper we discuss the problem of building autonomous animated creatures for interactive virtual environments which are also capable of being directed at multiple levels. We present an approach to control which allows an external entity to "direct" an autonomous creature at the motivational level, the task level, and the direct motor level. We also detail a layered architecture and a general behavioral model for perception and action-selection which incorporates explicit support for multi-level direction. These ideas have been implemented and used to develop several autonomous animated creatures. 1. INTRODUCTION Since Reynold's seminal paper in 1987, there have been a number of impressive papers on the use of behavioral models to generate computer animation. The motivati..

CINEMA: A System for Procedural Camera Movements

This paper presents a general system for camera movement upon which a wide variety of higher-level methods and applications can be built. In addition to the basic commands for camera placement, a key attribute of the CINEMA system is the ability to inquire information directly about the 3D world through which the camera is moving. With this information high-level procedures can be written that closely correspond to more natural camera specifications. Examples of some high-level procedures are presented. In addition, methods for overcoming deficiencies of this procedural approach are proposed. 1. Introduction Camera control is an integral part of any 3D interface. In recent years a number of techniques for interactively specifying camera movement have been implemented or proposed. Each of these techniques has provided an interface for solving a problem for a particular domain, but all of them have remained independent making it impossible to use them across domains. These domains incl..

Recursive Estimation for CAD Model Recovery

We describe a system for semiautomatically extracting 3-D object models from raw, uncalibrated video. The system utilizes a recursive estimator to accurately recover camera motion, pointwise structure, and camera focal length. Recovered 3-D points are used to compute a piecewise-smooth surface model for the object. Recovered motion and camera geometry are then used along with the original video to texture map the surfaces. We describe extensions to our previously reported geometry estimation formulation [2] that incorporate focal length estimation and other improvements, so that accurate estimates of structure and camera motion can be recovered from uncalibrated video cameras. We also discuss the buildup of texture maps from sequences of images, which is important in producing realisticlooking models. Since the computations parallel those used in computer graphics, efficient hardware already exists for doing this part of the modeling. Examples demonstrate generation of a realistic 3D t..