Applying Principles from Performance Arts for an Interactive Aesthetic Experience

Heightening tension and drama in 3-D interactive environments is a hard, but important problem. It is important for its potential utility in increasing motivation, involvement, engagement, and providing an overall pleasing aesthetic experience. These constructs are not only useful for entertainment applications, but can also impact training and edutainment applications due to the impact of emotions on learning. To stimulate emotional engagement, many researchers have explored several techniques, including enhancing the story content, developing new algorithms for dynamically creating stunning visual effects, and enhancing 3-D sound. In this paper, I describe a set of new design techniques based on a study of film and theatre theories, including acting and screenwriting. These design techniques are integrated within a multiagent interactive drama architecture. In this paper, I will discuss this architecture elaborating on the implementation of the theories studied and discussed from film and performance arts

Intelligent Lighting for Game Environments

Lighting design is an important topic of game development. There are many functions that lighting assumes in game environments, including directing attention, establishing good action visibility, evoking emotions, setting atmosphere, and providing depth. Current lighting design techniques rely on static manually designed lighting, where designers set up the positions, angles, and colors for each light in a level. Game environments are dynamic and unpredictable; physical and narrative scene content, including character locations, tension, and narrative goals, change unpredictably in real time due to user interaction. Thus, current static techniques often do not adequately adapt to serve desired aesthetic and communicative functions or perceptual effects. Recently, Doom 3 incorporated dynamic real-time lighting and demonstrated many advantages of using real-time dynamic lighting in games, including heightening the emotional engagement and enhancing the overall interactive experience. However, the technique is scripted and tightly coupled to game content. In this article, we present ELE (Expressive Lighting Engine), an intelligent lighting system that automatically sets and adjusts scene lighting in real time to achieve aesthetic and communicative functions, including evoking emotions, directing visual focus, and providing visibility and depth. ELE operates as a separate system that interacts with game/graphics engines through a standard interface. In this article, we will discuss ELE and its interface with Unreal Tournament 2003. We will also present results showing ELE in action. These results show: the utility of real-time adaptive lighting in providing visual focus, setting atmosphere, evoking emotions, and establishing visibility during interaction in interactive environments; and acceleration in the development process due to the introduction of an automatic system for lighting that can be overridden by designers at a high level, thus eliminating the time-consuming process of setting individual light parameters for each level and scene

An Interactive Narrative Architecture Based on Filmmaking Theory

Designing and developing an interactive narrative experience includes development of story content as well as a visual composition plan for visually realizing the story content. Theatre directors, filmmakers, and animators have emphasized the importance of visual design. Choices of character placements, lighting configuration, and camera movements, have been documented by designers to have direct impact on communicating the narrative, evoking emotions and moods, and engaging viewers. Many research projects focused on adapting the narrative content to the interaction, yet little attention was given to adapting the visual presentation. In this paper, I present a new approach to interactive narrative – an approach based on filmmaking theory. I propose an interactive narrative architecture, that in addition to dynamically selecting narrative events that suit the continuously changing situation, it automatically, and in real-time, reconfigures the visual design integrating camera movements, lighting modulation, and character movements. The architecture utilizes rules extracted from filmmaking, cinematography, and visual arts theories. I argue that such adaptation will lead to increased engagement and enriched interactive narrative experience

A User-Centric Adaptive Story Architecture – Borrowing from Acting Theories.

Interactive virtual environments are becoming increasingly popular for their utility in education, virtual training, and entertainment. These applications often rely on a scenario that is revealed to the user as he/she interacts with synthetic objects and characters that inhabit virtual worlds. Current interactive narrative architectures used in the interactive entertainment industry often use decision trees, which are hard to author and modify. Some interactive entertainment productions are starting to use more generative techniques, such as plan-based or goal-based narrative. In this paper, I present an interactive narrative architecture that extends current research in interactive narrative by integrating a user modeling and user behavior analysis technique, which I argue facilities a more engaging and fulfilling experience. I have implemented the architecture within an interactive story called Mirage. The architecture resulted from an iterative design and development process involving a team that included film and theatre professionals. During this design and development process, I have experimented and evaluated different narrative techniques, which resulted in the proposed architecture

Desktop 3-D Interactive Drama – Applying Design Principles from the Performance Arts.

Increasing emotional engagement in 3-D interactive environments is a hard, but important problem. It is important for its potential utility in increasing motivation, involvement, and engagement. These constructs are not only useful for entertainment applications, but also impact training and edutainment applications due to the impact of emotions on learning (Ulate, 2002; Wolfe, 2001). Many researchers have explored several techniques, including enhancing the story content to stimulate emotional engagement, developing new algorithms for dynamically creating stunning visual effects, and enhancing 3-D sound. Theatre and film have integrated many techniques that increase engagement, attention, and emotional involvement. In this paper, I describe a set of new design techniques integrated in an architecture that uses theatric and cinematic theories, specifically acting and screenwriting methods, to stimulate and improve emotional engagement in 3-D interactive narratives. In this paper, I discuss two research directions: (1) defining an interaction model for 3-D interactive narrative based on screenwriting theories, and (2) developing an actor-based agent architecture to simulate believable actions within an interactive narrative. The resulting architecture was implemented and tested within Mirage, an interactive story based on the Greek Tragedy Electra. Based on the critiques from several participants, I deduce that the resulting architecture presents significantly encouraging design techniques that can potentially increase emotional involvement and dramatic content of an interactive desktop 3D VR experience. The system and approach presented in this paper demonstrates an important new direction that adds to the set of techniques currently used and expand the design methodologies to include methods from disciplines, such as performance arts, theatre, and film

The Treatment of African-American Female Students in an Urban School District in the Midwestern United States

This research project examined the unfair treatment and disciplinary actions for African-American female students in an urban school district. The authors studied students in grades nine through 12 in both an early college high school and a traditional high school. Results indicated that AfricanAmerican female students are often treated as older than they were and sexually more mature than female Caucasian students. In addition, the suspension and disciplinary rates were abnormally high in our African American population

PEMBELAJARAN GRUP INVESTIGASI BERBANTUAN SPSS PADA MATA KULIAH STATISTIK UNTUK MENINGKATKAN KEMAMPUAN BERPIKIR KRITIS DAN SELF CONCEPT MATEMATIS MAHASISWA FKIP

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis peningkatan kemampuan berpikir kritis dan self-concept matematis mahasiswa dengan menggunakan model pembelajaran group investigation (GI) berbantuan SPSS dan model pembelajaran konvensional. Tipe Penelitian ini adalah eksperimen kuasi dengan desain pre-test-post-test control group design. populasi dalam penelitian ini adalah mahasiswa Jurusan Pendidikan Bahasa Indonesia. Melalui teknik purposive sampling, dua kelas dipilih sebagai sampel yaitu sebagai kelas eksperimen dan kelas kontrol. Instrumen yang digunakan berupa soal tes kemamuan berpikir kritis dan angket skala self- concept. Analisis data kemampuan berpikir kritis matematis dan self concept menggunakan uji Mann Whitney dari nilai gain yang diperoleh. Hasil penelitian menunjukan bahwa, (1) Terdapat perbedaan  kemampuan berpikir kritis dan self-concept matematis mahasiswa yang diajarkan dengan menggunakan model GI berbantuan SPSS dari mahasiswa yang diajarkan dengan menggunakan model konvensional; dan (2) Terdapat peningkatan kemampuan berpikir kritis kelas eksperimen sebesar 0,4 dan kelas kontol sebesar 0,3 sedangkan self-concept matematis mahasiswa yang pembelajarannya menggunakan model pembelajaran GI (eksperimen) yaitu sebesar 79,93 lebih baik daripada mahasiswa yang pembelajarannya menggunakan model pembelajaran konvensional (control) sebesar 65,1

A Comparison of Childhood Obesity, Technology, Exercise and Academic Habits Among Urban and Suburban Students in Ohio

Nearly 40% of children in the U.S. are overweight or obese and there has been a need to determine what factors contribute to these obesity rates among children. The authors examined over 600 children in Ohio, grades K- 8, in two urban and four suburban school districts regarding their behavioral patterns in relation to childhood obesity, exercise and academic habits. A questionnaire was administered to each student by a school counseling intern. The authors interviewed children and asked questions related to their eating habits, exercise, family dynamics, use of technology and study habits. From their results, the authors propose a number of interventions that they believe can be helpful for these children

Automating Lighting Design for Interactive Entertainment

Recent advances in computer graphics, particularly in real-time rendering, have resulted in major improvements in 3D graphics and rendering techniques in interactive entertainment. In this article we focus on the scenelighting process, which we define as configuring the number of lights in a scene, their properties (e.g., range and attenuation), positions, angles, and colors. Lighting design is well known among designers, directors, and visual artists for its vital role in influencing viewers\u27 perception by evoking moods, directing their gaze to important areas (i.e., providing visual focus), and conveying visual tension. It is, however, difficult to set positions, angles, or colors for lights within interactive scenes to accommodate these goals because an interactive scene?s spatial and dramatic configuration, including mood, dramatic intensity, and the relative importance of different characters, change unpredictably in real-time. There are several techniques developed by the game industry that establish spectacular real-time lighting effects within 3D interactive environments. These techniques are often time- and labor-intensive. In addition, they are not easily used to dynamically mold the visual design to convey communicative, dramatic, and aesthetic functions as addressed in creative disciplines such as art, film, and theatre. In this article we present a new real-time lighting design model based on cinematic and theatric lighting design theory. The proposed model is designed to automatically, and in realtime, adjust lighting in an interactive scene to accommodate the dramatic, aesthetic, and communicative functions described by traditional lighting design theories, while taking artistic constraints on style, visual continuity, and aesthetic function into account