Extending character-based storytelling with awareness and feelings

Most Interactive Storytelling systems developed to date have followed a task-based approach to story representation, using planning techniques to drive the story by generating a sequence of actions, which essentially "solve" the task to which the story is equated. One major limitation of this approach has been that it fails to incorporate characters' psychology, and as a consequence important aesthetic aspects of the narrative cannot be easily captured by Interactive Storytelling. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to Interactive Storytelling, which aims at reconciling narrative actions with the characters' attributed psychology as stated in the narrative. Our long-term goal is to be able to explore Interactive Storytelling for those narrative genres which are based on the characters' psychology rather than solely on their actions. We used as a starting point the formalisation by Flaubert himself of his novel Madame Bovary, which includes a detailed account of characters' desires and feelings. We describe a prototype in which characters' behaviour is driven by a real-time search-based planning system applying operators whose content is based on a specific inventory of feelings. Furthermore, the actual pattern of evolution of the character's plan, as measured through the variation of the search heuristic, is used to confer a sense of awareness to the characters, which can be used to generate feelings about its overall situation, from feelings of boredom to hope

Qualitative physics in virtual environments

In this paper, we describe a new approach to the creation of virtual environments, which uses qualitative physics to implement object behaviour. We adopted Qualitative Process Theory as a qualitative reasoning formalism, due to its representational properties (e.g., its orientation towards process ontologies and its explicit formulation of process’ pre-conditions). The system we describe is developed using a game engine and takes advantage of its event-based system to integrate qualitative process simulation in an interactive fashion. We use a virtual kitchen as a test environment. In this virtual world, we have implemented various behavioural aspects: physical object behaviour, complex device behaviour (appliances) and “alternative” (i.e. non-realistic) behaviours, which can all be simulated in user real-time. After a presentation of the system architecture and its implementation, we discuss example results from the prototype. This approach has potential applications in simulation and training, as well as in entertainment and digital arts. This work also constitutes a test case for the integration of an Artificial Intelligence technique into 3D user interfaces

The CaveUT system:Immersive entertainment based on a game engine

We describe recent developments in the CaveUT software, which supports immersive virtual reality installations based on the Unreal Tournament game engine. CaveUT implements several high-end VR features such as real-time stereoscopy with head and hand tracking. We demonstrate the use of CaveUT in the SAS Cube™, a PC-based CAVE™-like immersive four-screen display. One of the main advantages of the system is to support fully immersive VR while retaining the game engine’s advanced features for interaction and behavioral (or AI) systems. We illustrate the use of CaveUT on two installations: an artistic VR installation and an immersive interactive storytelling system

New behavioural approaches for virtual environments

We describe a new approach to the behaviour of 3D environments that supports the definition of physical processes and interactive phenomena. The work takes as a starting point the traditional event-based architecture that underlies most game engines. These systems discretise the environments' Physics by separating the objects' kinematics from the physical processes corresponding to objects interactions. This property has been used to insert a new behavioural layer, which implements AI-based simulation techniques. We introduce the rationale behind AI-based simulation and the techniques we use for qualitative Physics, as well as a new approach to world behaviour based on the induction of causal impressions. This is illustrated through several examples on a test environment. This approach has implications for the definition of complex world behaviour or non-standard physics, as required in creative applications