Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 Network of Excellence IRIS: Integrating Research in Interactive Virtual Storytelling

Participants : Stéphane Donikian [contact] , Marc Christie [contact] , Christophe Lino, Julian Joseph.

The IRIS project (Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling) is a 3-year Network of Excellence project funded by the European Commission (FP-7 Grant Agreement 231824), from Jan. 2009 to Dec. 2011. The project gathers 10 academic partners: University of Teeside (project coordinator UK), INRIA (FR), Fachhochschule Erfurt (DE), TECFA Geneve (CH), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL), Universitat Augsburg (DE), Université La Rochelle (FR), OFAI Vienne (AT) and Newcastle University (UK).

IRIS (Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling) aims at creating a virtual centre of excellence that will be able to achieve breakthroughs in the understanding of interactive storytelling and the development of corresponding technologies. It is organised around four major objectives:

• To extend interactive storytelling technologies in terms of performance and scalability, so that they can support the production of actual interactive narratives

• To make the next generation of interactive storytelling technologies more accessible to authors and content creators of different media backgrounds (scriptwriters, storyboarders, game designers)

• To develop a more integrated approach to interactive storytelling technologies, achieving a proper integration with cinematography

• To develop methodologies to evaluate interactive storytelling systems as well as the media experience of interactive narrative

FP7 STREP Fet-Open Tango

Participants : Julien Pettré [contact] , Jonathan Perrinet, Anne-Hélène Olivier.

The goal of the TANGO project is to take some familiar ideas about affective communication one radical step further by developing a framework to represent and model the essential interactive nature of social communication based on non-verbal communication with facial and bodily expression. Indeed, many everyday actions take place in a social and affective context and presuppose that the agents share this context. But current motion synthesis techniques, e.g. in computer graphics, mainly focus on physical factors. The role of other factors, and specifically psychological variables, is not yet well understood.

In 2011, we conducted an experimental study on the effect of emotions during physical interactions between people. We focused the case of locomotion. We studied various situations of interaction such as collision avoidance or walking together. We asked professional actors to play such situation under conditions of emotions. Preliminary results show some emergent behavior, such as some leader-follower relations between people that depend on emotional context.