Interactive Narratives are systems that use automated narrative generation
techniques to create multiple story variants which can be
shown to an audience, as virtual narratives, using cinematic staging
techniques. The focus of previous research has included aspects
such as the quality of automatically generated narratives and the
way in which audiences respond to them. However in this work we
have developed a mechanism for control of interactive narratives
that supports their use in experiments to assess story understanding.
This is implemented in our demonstration system, which features
two parts: an interface that allows high-level specification of criteria
for story understanding experiments; and a participant interface in
which virtual narratives, conforming to the experimental design, are
presented as 3D visualizations. The virtual narrative is based on a
pre-existing children’s story, and features a cast of virtual characters