Technische Universität Darmstadt
Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek |
Autor: | Braun, Norbert |
Titel: | Nonlinear Storytelling |
Dissertation: | TU Darmstadt, Fachbereich Informatik, 2003 |
Dis_Norbert.pdf | (4380959 | Byte) |
Introduction:
The telling of stories is a form of information presentation commonly
used by people all over the world, within every period of time. For
this
reason, it seems to be a matter of course to use this form of
presentation
and data structuring in computer science. Unfortunately, the
interactive
components of telling a story get lost, if one tries to tell stories
automatically.
The audience is not able to manipulate the narrator or the story in an
adequate way.
To overcome this situation, an approach to interactive narration of continuous media (like video clips, animation or VR) is developed The general idea is focused on the abstract modelling of a story, with the story based on selective fragments (video clips) and generative fragments (animation), combined in scenes. The concrete formulation of the story is enhanced with direct manipulative interaction possibilities on the fragments as well as with conversational interaction possibilities on the fragments and the narrator, the concrete fragments and interaction possibilities are interpreted on the abstract level of story forming and give therefore the basis for interactive narration of stories.
The concepts of this work are accessible for application programmers via the so called Nonlinear Storytelling API, the concepts are evaluated and verified in several project applications, namely the MAP, EMBASSI, DIVA, IzA and GEIST projects. The verification was done, based on a systematically compiled catalogue of requirements. With the help of this catalogue the projects were evaluated. In result, the basic assumptions of nonlinear narration were able to be verified in this work.
The following paragraphs give some details on the story processing, conversational interaction and direct manipulation (video-hyperlinks) parts of this work.
Story Processing:
Propp, a Russian Structuralist, wrote the book ‘Morphology of the folk
tale’, introducing a semiotic approach for story understanding and
story
generation. This days (1928) his work was ground-breaking – and still
in
our days, his work is the basement of many approaches for automated
storytelling.
The basics of Propp’s approach are quickly explained:
He identifies the smallest functions of story, with every function
is a basic unit of abstract action, done by abstract actors. He showed
that every action, done by any actor, has a different meaning in regard
to its (temporal) position in a story.
(Example: Given an opponent, a hero, a princess, a father (the king).
Those abstract roles could be used to identify any real actors –have a
look at ‘Star Wars IV’: Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Princess Lea, Obi
Wan. Typically, a story starts with an initial action – the princess
getting
abducted by the opponent. Another look at ‘Star Wars IV’: As a start,
Lea
gets abducted by Darth Vader.)
More than that, the composition of the functions depends on specific
rules, these rules are universal for tales. (As one can see, these
rules
are used for most of the stories you enjoy in TV or at the movies.)
With
these rules it is possible to generate new stories, based on given
story
fragments.
Until this point, there is no interaction involved. We have expanded
the approach to abstract interactions – introducing the concept that
actions
may or may not fail. With this concept, the functions are expanded to a
polymorphism – e.g., the function ‘reaction of the hero’ (so called
function
F) is expanded to the two possibilities of ‘right reaction of the hero’
(so called function F+) and ‘wrong reaction of the hero’ (so called
Function
F-). As one can see, this kind of interaction is very abstract – just
like
the semiotic approach, for this reason, it fits so well into that
approach.
Of course, the right or wrong result of scene interaction is simplified
for this example – the approach offers possibilities to define all kind
of abstract interaction results. The story fragments (morphologic
functions),
are adapted in each case to the needs of the several projects.
We use the expanded approach to concatenate scenes to a story – the
scenes are of course predefined, with a given set of actors and
actions,
annotated with semiotic knowledge. We use the abstract semiotic
knowledge
to process the story line, this without any knowledge about the ‘real’
actions and interactions within a scene. The only thing we get out of a
scene is the abstract interaction knowledge – therefore, the
polymorphic
function (e.g. F) identified with the scene, morphed to one of its
specializations
(e.g. F+ or F-).
Scene Interaction:
Scene interaction is done in a conversational way via virtual actors
and/or virtual narrators, or direct manipulative via video hyperlinks
within
video clips.
The video hyperlink approach to video interaction uses an advanced
version of the common hypermedia metaphor – the temporal video
hyperlink.
The hypermedia metaphor is expanded to the properties of the medium –
it
gets s start, a duration and an end. This characteristic is visible for
the user while the hyperlink is active – therefore, the user always has
the knowledge about the start, the current position, the time remaining
until the end and the end of a hyperlink. The presentation of the
hyperlink
is intramedial (within the same medium) – an annotation of the video’s
graphics is done within the video graphics, an annotation of the
video’s
acoustic is done within the video’s audio channel. Even the interaction
of the user happens intramedial – graphical hyperlinks are activated
via
graphic interaction, acoustic hyperlinks are activated via the voice of
the user.
Integrated approach:
The approach, presented in this work, integrates several aspects of
virtual storytelling. Within the scene level, presentation and
interaction
is done using (advanced) approaches of Hyperstories and Emergent
Narrative.
Within the story forming level, presentation and interaction is
organized
in a semiotic way, as so called Controlled Storytelling.
Conclusion:
This work presents an interactive storytelling approach, based on
adapted
literary concepts for an interactive high level story forming
algorithm,
as well as on abstract and concrete new interaction concepts for the
concrete
formulation of the story in scenes. To the audience, the approach gives
back the possibilities of manipulating a story while experiencing the
story
– and closes the circle from the beginning of verbal storytellig to our
times of multimedia-enhanced storytelling in the information society.
Dokument aufgenommen : | 2004-11-09 |
URL: | http://elib.tu-darmstadt.de/diss/000497 |