Stories within Immersive Virtual Environments
How can we use immersive and interactive technologies to portray stories? How can we take advantage of the fact that within immersive virtual environments people tend to respond realistically to virtual situations and events to develop narrative content? Stories in such a media would allow the parti...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2012 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/665468 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/665468 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Realitat virtual Realidad virtual Virtual reality Intel·ligència artificial Inteligencia artificial Artificial intelligence Neurociència cognitiva Neurociencia cognitiva Cognitive neuroscience Narrativa Storytelling Ciències de la Salut 159.9 |
| Sumario: | How can we use immersive and interactive technologies to portray stories? How can we take advantage of the fact that within immersive virtual environments people tend to respond realistically to virtual situations and events to develop narrative content? Stories in such a media would allow the participant to contribute to the story and interact with the virtual characters while the narrative plot would not change, or change only up to how it was decided a priori. Participants in such a narrative would be able to freely interact within the virtual environments and yet still be aware of the main trust of the stories presented. How can we preserve the ‘respond as if it is real’ phenomenon induced by these technologies, but also develop an unfolding plot in this environment? In other words, can we develop a story, conserving the structure, its psychological and cultural richness and the emotional and cognitive involvement it supposes, in an interactive and immersive audiovisual space? In recent years Virtual Reality therapy has shown that an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) with a predetermined plot can be experienced as an interactive narrative. For example, in the context of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment, the reactions of the participants and the therapeutic impact suggest that an IVE is a qualitatively different experience than classical audiovisual content. However, the methods to develop such kind of content are not systematic, and the consistency of the experience is only granted by a therapist or operator controlling in real time the unfolding narrative. Can a story with a strong classical plot be rendered in an automated and interactive immersive virtual environment? The thesis developed through this document is that it is possible. Specifically the thesis is that this can be achieved through two principles of interaction that we call ‘ATP’ and ‘Substitution’. ATP stands for ‘Advance The Plot’, and it is an underlying goal of the system to always find the best action possible in any given context that will advance the state of the story being expressed. The second principle, Substitution, states that the human participant in an immersive interactive story can assume the role of any character or, what is equivalent, that if he does not do what the system expects him to do, a virtual character will do it instead. To implement such principles, a story cognitive model named Trama is proposed. The purpose of such a story model is to give artificial agents a guide to decide what to do in an interactive situation in such a way that the human participant has the impression of interacting within one or more narrative plots. To validate such method, three experiments address the main assumptions of the approach.The first one is concerned with whether people interact with virtual characters in a similar way they do with real people, analysing this in a particular aspect of interpersonal communication, namely interpersonal distances. The second assesses whether people identify with their virtual bodies, which is one of the basic assumptions underlying the principles of interaction proposed. The third experiment shows that the story model allows to implement stories in such a way that people can interact within an immersive virtual environment while conserving the impression there is a narrative plot, and that they have assumed a particular role in it. In addition to the experiments, we explore whether the formalism developed within the Trama model captures some aspects of the important role that stories have in cognitive development. |
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