Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI) Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at ------------------------------------------------------------------------- VORTRAG ******* Andrew Stern, M.Sc., www.interactivestory.net Towards Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama Andrew Stern is an artist and computer scientist who has spent the last ten years developing AI-based interactive virtual characters and interactive drama. His talk will cover an array of design and technical issues involved in creating compelling, lifelike AI-based interactive characters, stories and art. He will discuss the development of the award-winning Dogz, Catz and Babyz interactive virtual characters, which sold over two million copies worldwide over the past six years. These characters were achieved through an artistic combination of a reactive behavior-based AI, a simple emotion system, a gestural user interface and realtime rendered non-photorealistic 3D animation. The advantages and limitations of this approach for interactive story will be presented. Building upon the design and AI from Petz and Babyz, Stern is now collaborating with Michael Mateas, an artist and AI researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Motivated by their belief that a "fully-realized" computer-based interactive drama has not yet been built, the authors are currently engaged in a three-year collaboration to build Facade, an interactive story integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies. Facade will combine a reactive behavior-based architecture (an extended version of the Oz project's Hap language) with a deliberative story manager - an attempt to merge of "character" and "plot" - designed to integrate the user's interactions into the space of potential plot directions and character behaviors in the story. Certain techniques from Aristotelian drama such as the story "beat" and dramatic value change will be operationalized. The system will have a natural language and gestural input interface, within a 3D virtual world. Zeit: Montag 2. April 2001, 18:30 Uhr pktl. Ort: Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1. OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl