The Show Must Go On: On the Use of Embodiment, Space and Gesture in Computational Storytelling
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The Show Must Go On: On the Use of Embodiment, Space and Gesture in Computational Storytelling Philipp Wicke1 · Tony Veale1 Received: 18 January 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 © Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Stories are made to be told, yet the computational generation of stories has principally focused on stories as textual artifacts, rather than on the telling, or indeed the performance, of stories. The performative aspect of stories, in which a teller brings a tale to life, requires more than the written word. We humans use our bodies to enact a story, through the apt use of motion, space, timing and gesture. This work explores the physical enactment of computer-generated stories using multiple robots, which narrate the tale, and take on different roles of characters within it. They use pantomime to enhance the drama of narrative events, and use naturalistic gestures for more subtle communicative effects. They also use space as a mirror for abstract concerns such as affect and social relations. The paper outlines the Scéalability framework for turning story artifacts into performances, and presents empirical findings on the effectiveness of various embodied strategies. In particular, we show that audiences are sensitive to the coherent use of space in embodied story-telling, and appreciate the schematic use of spatial movements as much as more culturally specific pantomime gestures. For the presented study, we focus on one dimension of spatial movement involving two robot actors. Keywords Computational creativity · Story-telling · Story-generation
Introduction A story is more than a text. Even so, texts are an important window into language in the fields of cognitive linguistics and computational creativity. The latter typically views story-generation as a process of text generation, but what is often overlooked in this view is a quality that cannot be found in the text itself, and which only emerges when the text is brought to life through performance. An engaging story-teller uses not just speech, but gesture, space (both movement and orientation * Philipp Wicke [email protected] 1
University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
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New Generation Computing
Fig. 1 Adapted from [18]. Simple geometric shapes move in a fashion that encourages a narrative interpretation
within it) and timing to enhance the drama of the tale. Real story-tellers show as well as tell. They use their bodies to tell the tale, and we believe that our machines should do likewise. This paper presents a framework for the embodied performance of computer-generated stories with anthropomorphic robots that can use gesture, spatial movement and orientation to turn story-telling into story-performing. Our goals in this research program are to explore how physical embodiment can serve to enhance aspects of computational storytelling as a performance, and also drive improvements into the automated generation of those stories. As such, the work pursues a performa
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