2005 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Abstract

The Trial The Trail is an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience designed to engage the user as a central protagonist in a compelling interactive drama. It is designed for a projection-based, 3-D stereo VR display with one large screen or multiple screens forming a virtual theater. Immersive VR puts the user inside the virtual world with the other characters rather than outside, viewing the world on a monitor and manipulating an avatar of herself. This collaborative project brings together artificial intelligence and visualization research with the goal of creating intelligent actor-agents and interactive, dramatic, virtual reality experiences. Our interactive drama is designed to create an unfolding story around the user which the agents establish, populate, maintain and influence. We build our VR dramas using a two part structure; a psychological substrate where we explicitly determine the emotional states we want to evoke in the user; and an implementation level with three elements - an interactive script, a smart set, and actor-agents - that turns the psychological plot into a dramatically evolving series of responsiveconundrums for the user.