| Josephine Anstey | The Trial The Trail | |||
Progress |
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 Coit House |
Virtual
Reality MicroTheatre - Aug 4-7 Dave and Josephine organized the Virtual Reality MicroTheatre
at Coit House, the oldest house in Buffalo, for the Buffalo Infringement Festival.
Featuring Virtual Reality works focusing on interactive narrative,
and
including our current version of Act3 of The Trial The Trail.
Paper in Intelligent Agent Magazine and at VR/HCI International - July 05 Josephine presented Agents in Love: On the
Construction and Use of Emotional Agents in VR on a panel at VR
International (part of HCI International this year). The paper is also
in Intelligent Agent
Magazine, Vol 5 #1.
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Demo
at AAAI Conference - July 11-13 Mike and Stu demo'ed their wampus
world
agent at the AAAI conference in Pittsburg. The wampus agent and actor
agents use the same basic acting system and agent architecture. They
also showed the
latest video-tape docementation of Act 3. Patofil and the three bad
guys are fully
automonous agents, the SNePs "mind" connected to the Ygdrasil "body"
over sockets, Filopat is scripted and runs only in Ygdrasil. See movie,
Read the paper, MGLAIR
Agents in Virtual and other Graphical
Environments.
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Demo at AIIDE Conference - June
1-3 First Annual Artificial Intelligence and
Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference in Marina Del Rey.
Josephine and Stu
brought a head mounted display and tracking system and demo'ed the four
agents we have built so far. Patofil and three bad guys working in a
multi-agent system. Read the paper, The
Trial
The Trail, Act 3: A Virtual Reality Drama Using Intelligent
Agents.
Trupti Graduates and goes off to
work on Asimo for the summer - MayTrupti Devdas Nayak, Patofil:
An MGLAIR Agent
for a Virtual Reality Drama, SNeRG Technical Note 38, Department
of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo, The State
Universtiy of New York, Buffalo, NY, May 10, 2005.
Technical Report - March 30 Stuart C. Shapiro, Josephine
Anstey, David E. Pape, Trupti Devdas
Nayak, Michael Kandefer, Orkan Telhan, MGLAIR
Agents in a Virtual Reality
Drama, Technical Report 2005-08,
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University at
Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, March 30, 2005.
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2004 User Test - October 29th & 30 New Team Member - September 04 Mike Kandefer has joined the
group to work on multi-agent systems, he will start working on
the bad guy agents in Act3 Scene 2.
Cosign Conference - September 04 Psycho-Drama
in VR, Josephine Anstey, Dave Pape, Stuart C. Shapiro, Orkan
Telhan
and Trupti Devdas Nayak, Proceedings of The Fourth Conference on
Computation Semiotics (COSIGN 2004), University of Split, Croatia,
2004, 5-13.(pdf)
New Team Member - August 04Anthony Ekeh, a computational
linguist, has joined us to work on speech recognition. His starting
point is making a grammar of words and phrases users are likely
to
say. To start with this is based on guess
work, after our first user test we should have some real data to go
on. He is planning to use the SONIC system from CU.
IRB Certification Approved - May 04 This means we can do formal
user-testing. We plan our first user-test of Act
3 in Sept/Oct 2004
Vik Rao's Honors Thesis on the Princess Agent - May 04 VR, Art and Networking - April 04 We showed a very early version of
the Patofil agent and the VE during the FreeCooperation, Networking,Art
and Collaboration Conference.
Work Begins on Storyboard3 Our research group started work
on Storyboard
3. See agents for details. We
started with Act
3 and the agent Patofil. Trupti Devdas Nayak is working on
the agent's mind, Orkan Telhan is working on the agent's embodiment and
the virtual environment. Paul Visco is working on models for the VE.
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2003 IRCAF Award - November 03 Research support by grant from
University at Buffalo
VSMM 03 Conference - October 03 Virtual
Drama with Intelligent Agents,paper andpresentation.
Abstract: This paper describes, "The Trial The Trail" a work of interactive drama for a projection-based virtual reality system. The project marries a virtual reality authoring system and an srtificial intelligence system. First User Test: Hallwalls
Show - June 03 For this show/user-test/wizard
of
oz experiment, we put together a version of the environment following
the second storyboard and showed it at Hallwalls in Buffalo to
audiences
of one or two people at a time. The tests pointed up many
problems
and lead to the third story board.
Tidse 03 Conference Collaboration with SNePS group In 2003 we started collaborating
with UB's SNePS AI group to build the actor-agents that will
inhabit the world. see agents.
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2002 By May 2002 we have built models and scenes, and written code, for the scene from the first storyboard at the entrance to the zone and the sequence where the user fights a sentient morningstar head. Showing these scenes leads me to rethink the project - it seems to be moving in a direction that is too literal both conceptually and visually. I do a lot more thinking about the story I'm trying to involve the user in, and all the possible deviations the user could make. This results in many notes and diagrams and a second storyboard. It has been hard to pin down the visual design. I want an environment which has a "not real" quality for several reasons. At times I want to give the user a certain Brechtian distance so that she becomes more aware of her actions and reactions. At times I want to keep her off balance, aware that she is in a world with some constructed rules but not quite sure what those rules are. The visuals should always help build the user's psychological context - as a person on a, possibly dangerous, possibly ridiculous, quest. Some of the early models are a little too concrete and definite. However we plan to use these models to create a virtual environment within a virtual environment which will contain the first "trap" that the user will encounter. Here she is tempted to mount a rather romantic rescue of a victim in distress, later she will be mocked for this attempt, and her guide will insist that this side-plot is nothing but a figment of her imagination. As we proceed, the rest of the world will be much more whispy, unsubstantial, suggested. I am also trying to find a style for the virtual actors that is not too real but suggests a person rather than the creature-like actor in The Thing Growing. We used our networked VR application, PAAPAB , to experiment on some puppets with cloth-like wings that we plan to use here. I am also inclining towards having the agents wear stylistic masks - comedy/tragedy masks - that will change according to their mood. 2001 In October 2001, I make a first storyboard for the
project. The story-board represents the progress of an ideal user
through the story space and acts as a backbone from which to hang the
alternatives that result from the users actions.
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