Section: Application Domains

Interactive Digital Storytelling

Interactive digital storytelling, including novel forms of edutainment and serious games, provides access to social and human themes through stories which can take various forms and contains opportunities for massively enhancing the possibilities of interactive entertainment, computer games and digital applications. It provides chances for redefining the experience of narrative through interactive simulations of computer-generated story worlds and opens many challenging questions at the overlap between computational narratives, autonomous behaviours, interactive control, content generation and authoring tools.

Of particular interest for the Mimetic research team, virtual storytelling triggers challenging opportunities in providing effective models for enforcing autonomous behaviours for characters in complex 3D environments. Offering both low-level capacities to characters such as perceiving the environments, interacting with the environment and reacting to changes in the topology, on which to build higher-levels such as modelling abstract representations for efficient reasonning, planning paths and activities, modelling cognitive states and behaviours requires the provision of expressive, multi-level and efficient computational models. Furthermore virtual storytelling requires the seamless control of the balance between the autonomy of characters and the unfolding of the story story through the narrative discourse. Virtual storytelling also raises challenging questions on the conveyance of a narrative through interactive or automated control of the cinematography (how to stage the characters, the lights and the cameras). For example, estimating visibility of key subjects, or performing motion planning for cameras and lights are central issues for which have not received satisfactory answers in the litterature.