What Would You Do in Their Shoes? Experiencing Different Perspectives in an Interactive Drama for Multiple Users

Abstract

Following the idea of improvisational theater, we built a multi-agent system where multiple users can experience an interactive drama from different perspectives. Depending on the roles that the users are given in advance, the situation is perceived in various ways and interaction possibilities are directed according to the assigned role. The computer-controlled agents' behavior needs to be highly reactive in order to allow for flexibility in the conversational flow of the structured interactive narrative. In this paper, we describe a system architecture that allows multi-user participation as well as distributed behavior planning for multiple agents.

Exploration of User Reactions to Different Dialog-Based Interaction Styles

“…An interesting observation is the user's perception of how the Virtual Beergarden scenario is perceived by human users. Initially, the interactive system was designed to resemble a virtual improvisational theater [9]. Our evaluation study, however, reveals that the story reminds more of playing a video game.…”

Towards Culturally-Aware Virtual Agent Systems

“…By realizing that, users are not only able to learn by observing virtual agents interacting with each other, but also from possible pitfalls or positive achievements experienced by other users. In (Endrass et al, 2009a), a system architecture is introduced that provides planning of coherent behavior for an arbitrary number of virtual agents. Furthermore, the system architecture allows multiple users to interact with each other as well as with the participating virtual agents.…”

Generating Culture-Specific Gestures for Virtual Agent Dialogs

“…However, many researchers are only interested in certain aspects of behavior. In our interactive storytelling system [1], for example, we investigate dialog generation. But when focusing on verbal behavior, nonverbal behavior cannot be left aside.…”