Understanding virtual actors

Publicado em: "2010 Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment: SBGames 2010 : proceedings". ISBN 978-0-7695-4359-8Autonomous Digital Actors represent the next step in authoring movies with believable characters, in a way that will allow them to be trained for acting specific roles in a story, suggesting appropriate behaviors during their performance. This article presents an overview of the art of acting and directing and how these concepts were used to elaborate a Virtual Actor metaphor. Also, we present an agent architecture for describing and implementing the virtual actors’ acting knowledge base.(undefined

An Authoring Framework for Interactive Narrative with Virtual Characters

Within the research area of “interactive narration”, the production process constitutes a decisive bottleneck. Currently this bottleneck constricts the progress of the field, since the peculiarities of the research area demand that applications must be actually built in order to concretize ideas and to test the technologies. Purely theoretical considerations are not sufficient, given that the requirements can only be clarified during the production process. Methods and software environments have been lacking that could be em-ployed to rapidly implement and to iteratively enhance applications related to interactive narration, so that this iterative process would encompass the authoring tools, the application design ideas, and the requisite technolo-gies. Taking this need as a point of departure, the work presented here demon-strates the first generic software framework for the creation of interactive narratives with virtual characters, with a strong focus on visual authoring methods. The framework consists of a complete functional software envi-ronment that has already proven its efficacy and generality within a variety of projects. As basis of this framework, a novel hybrid visual formalism was developed. It enables various ways of combining directed graphs and of algorithmic control methods. With this combination, the development team can employ the directed graph as a main formalism that can be put to use immediately, and add other control mechanisms partially and incrementally as required during the progressing implementation of the application ideas. Using the directed graph, which is fairly easy to manage, as the basic structure, it is possible to guarantee that the additional technologies employed respond precisely to the requirements of the application and of the content. In this way, the framework described here enables computer scientists, domain experts and content creators to work together to create novel, often experimental applications. It is particularly suited to systems which rely on a set of fixed elements or of fixed templates, and where the creation effort is centered on the question of how to determine the sequence of basic ele-ments. A series of novel design ideas for narrative applications is also presented in this dissertation, together with the basic patterns for employing the authoring framework to implement them; this demonstrates its aptness for the creation task, and also concretizes certain hypotheses that I have developed on why and how interactivity can be combined with narration. Further on, this dissertation presents a model of an authoring framework that shall allow for concrete authoring of applications that rely on autonom-ous virtual characters. No alternative models currently exist on how authors could control even the details of the behaviors of autonomous virtual characters. It is assumed that an autonomous virtual character can be at most parameterized abstractly. The model presented here shows how autonomous virtual characters can be precisely authored, in spite of their autonomy. It is based on the concept of a set of “endorsed stories”, and also contains components for learning algorithms

Preface [to Interactive storytelling]

[Excerpt] The rich programme of ICIDS 2009, comprising invited talks, technical presentations and posters, demonstrations, and co-located post-conference workshops clearly underscores the event’s status as premier international meeting in the domain.[...]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Combining explicit and implicit interaction modes with virtual characters in public spaces

Improving the visiting experience of exhibitions and public spaces in general has been the subject of several studies over the past years. In the study presented here, we were particularly interested in understanding the potential of combining explicit and implicit interaction modes between virtual characters and visitors. We present in this paper scenarios that exemplify the combination of these interaction modes, and an initial study with user involvement, based on a software platform that we are currently developing. We report on first feedback from users about the system-level interaction, usability, and visiting experience. The tested case study should create a sense of ubiquity of the virtual characters throughout the visit, and take advantage of their communication skills, at the same time giving freedom to visiting groups to interact with each other and to make visits to the exhibition place at the order they desire.This research was partially supported by the project VirtualActor, PTDC/EIA/69236/2006 that is financed by Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) and by the project GUIDE, 248893, that is funded by the European Commission under FP7 - 2007-2013

STREEN: designing smart environments for story reading with children

Augmented e-books employ digital media to enhance the reading experience, and although they have the potential to promote the reader’s engagement, so far the possibilities afforded by these technologies have been underexplored. In this article, we study the potential of literally transforming the space where reading takes place, in order to create superior reading experiences and foster the emergence of an immersive story universe, placing the reader in an imagined time and space. We present ongoing work on STREEN (Story Reading Environmental Enrichment), a smart environment for story reading. STREEN is able to trigger digital media enrichment depending on the reading performance and the narrative. We explain our innovation methodology that is based on an analysis of the design space to create a framework for a design thinking process. Additionally, we describe the first steps of using this methodology to explore and design STREEN solutions for primary school children.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio