Interactive Storytelling Applications Research Articles

Development of an Interactive Live Streaming System for Language Learning

<p>In this paper, we propose Virtual Avatar Interactive Live Streaming System (VAILSS), our approach to streaming 3D avatar performances in interactive storytelling applications using multimodal interactive techniques. This study focuses on developing a virtual live interaction system for VTubers in the context of language learning. A live virtual performance from our system consists of three components: 1) an Avatar generation framework, 2) an AI motion capture system, and 3) an interactive storytelling engine. The system integrates artificial intelligence and uses motion capture to identify facial expressions and movements, enabling virtual characters to provide live storytelling services. Additionally, the system allows for bi-directional interaction with players through tablet touch and voice. The system aims to promote multimodal learning channels for the masses. To gain deeper insights into the effectiveness of virtual role-playing in language learning, we organized a three-week workshop to investigate our system’s impact on user experience. We extended invitations to 17 night-school freshmen from the NFU Department of Applied Foreign Languages, enrolled in an English class focused on tour guides, to participate in a virtual performance. The experiment results demonstrated that the VAILSS positively affected students’ learning outcomes, particularly in enhancing foreign language acquisition.</p> <p> </p>

Design and Development of Animation Software for Interactive Storytelling

Animation is crucial in producing immersive and compelling user experiences since interactive storytelling has grown in popularity across many digital media platforms. In this work, the design and development of an animation programme for use in interactive storytelling applications is discussed. To make it easier to create engrossing narratives, the programme intends to offer a user-friendly interface, effective animation capabilities, and seamless interaction with interactive features. In order to speed up the production process and provide fresh concepts, this project investigates an innovative method to the creation of animation story content. This study explores the viability of using digital storyboarding as a direct method for story creation and examines its benefits and drawbacks in terms of story development, structure, and its implications for animation education. The results show that the storyboard-driven approach to producing animation content is efficient in both time and effort. For beginners, this strategy works well because it helps with idea visualisation and refinement. Notably, the storyboard-driven approach can be used to develop a well-structured plot. This method's contributions to the story structure are primarily noticeable in terms of the plot, climax, and conclusion when compared to the conventional production pipeline. This paper supports the use of a digital storyboard-driven method for producing animation content. For new animators in particular, it offers benefits in terms of productivity and idea visualisation. The approach has a noticeable effect on tale structure, with an emphasis on important plot components. The conventional method of story development is still preferred by specialists, thus it is important to take into account personal preferences and domain knowledge.

Open Domain Collaborative Storytelling with Say Anything

In this demonstration we present Say Anything, an open domain interactive storytelling application where an author's original story sentences are used to select subsequent sentences from a corpus of millions of stories extracted from Internet weblogs.

Towards consistency in interactive storytelling

Interactive storytelling (IS) systems are an emerging class of interactive entertainment applications with an emphasis on narrative aspects. One of the approaches used to develop IS applications is based on planning algorithms. This article describes two mechanisms that can be introduced to planning-based IS in order to solve two problems that are inherent in this approach. The first is a technique to control the pace at which a story evolves, so that the story that is generated follows a specific tension arc. The second is a method that makes it possible to avoid dead-ends in a story by intervening to justify previous events. These mechanisms help to produce a more enjoyable user experience, since their use tends to result in stories with higher narrative consistency. Results from experiments with users suggest that the proposed mechanisms improve both of the aspects addressed by this article.

A goal-oriented development tool to automate the incorporation of intelligent agents into interactive digital media applications

Recent developments in games and interactive storytelling applications have seen artificially intelligent computer controlled characters being included extensively. Non-human controlled characters are starting to play an increasingly significant role in enhancing the perceived intelligence of games. Although many of them employed certain cheating techniques (e.g. allocating more resources at the start to AI opponents to make them appear more aggressive), some limited learning did appear in several games (e.g. letting AI opponents remember where human users initiated attacked in previous game). In our Virtual Singapura research project, we incorporate software agents into our virtual world to provide more complex user interactions. With intelligent software agents being infused into interactive digital media applications, there is great potential in improving the overall user experience. However, during the process of our research, we discovered that the traditional way of adding a multi-agent system into a computer game requires a large amount of investment in time and resources and a high level of expertise in Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). Moreover, game AI is usually closely coupled with other parts of the game code which makes it hard to reuse or replace. This research proposes a multi-agent development and runtime framework which not only provides ease-of-use agent design and implementation tools but also can be easily plugged into various interactive digital media applications.