Affective Interactive Narrative in the CALLAS Project
Interactive Narrative relies on the ability for the user (and spectator) to intervene in the course of events so as to influence the unfolding of the story. This influence is obviously different depending on the Interactive Narrative paradigm being implem
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hool of Computing, University of Teesside, United Kingdom {f.charles,s.lemercier,m.o.cavazza}@tees.ac.uk 2 Multimedia Concepts and Applications Group, Augsburg University, Germany {vogt,bee,andre}@informatik.uni-augsburg.de 3 IUT of Montreuil, University Paris VIII, France {m.mancini,c.pelachaud}@iut-univ.paris8.fr 4 Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Department of Electrical Engineering, TCTS Lab, Belgium [email protected] 5 BBC Research, Tadworth, Surrey, United Kingdom [email protected]
1 Introduction Interactive Narrative relies on the ability for the user (and spectator) to intervene in the course of events so as to influence the unfolding of the story. This influence is obviously different depending on the Interactive Narrative paradigm being implemented, i.e. the user being a spectator or taking part in the action herself as a character. If we consider the case of an active spectator influencing the narrative, most systems implemented to date [1] have been based on the direct intervention of the user either on physical objects staged in the virtual narrative environment or on the characters themselves via natural language input [1] [3]. While this is certainly empowering the spectator, there may be limitations as to the realism of that mode of interaction if we were to transpose Interactive Narrative for a vast audience. Spontaneous audience reactions are not always as structured and well-defined as previous Interactive Narrative systems have assumed. If we consider that the narrative experience can be essentially interpreted as generating various emotional states (e.g. tension) which derive from its aesthetic qualities (e.g. suspense [6]), a logical consequence would be to analyse spectator’s emotional reactions and use these as an input to an Interactive Narrative system. Such an approach would actually constitute a “feedback loop” between an Interactive Narrative inducing emotions and the analysis of the quality and intensity of such emotions expressed by the user. It is notoriously difficult to accurately detect and categorise spontaneous affective states occurring when users are engaged with various media. This is why we have revised the affective loop described above and, in an attempt to improve the elicitation of user emotional reactions we have inserted a virtual agent, acting as a co-spectator into that loop (see an illustration of the installation in Fig. 1). The system can now be described as comprising i) an interactive narrative using traditional plan-based generative techniques, which is able to create situations exhibiting different levels of tension or suspense (by featuring the main character in M. Cavazza and S. Donikian (Eds.): ICVS 2007, LNCS 4871, pp. 210 – 213, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
Affective Interactive Narrative in the CALLAS Project
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Fig. 1. Affective Interactive Narrative installation
dangerous situations) ii) an expressive virtual character (implemented using the Greta system [4]) whose role is, by accessing the internal data of the narrati
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