InterFace portraits: communicative-expressive interaction with a character's mind

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I introduce the notion of <i>communicative-expressive interaction</i> with a character's mind, within an interactive fiction video. It is an interaction model that allows a participant continuous interaction with a story as a way of increasing the participant's agency and immersion and consequently both the sense of engagement and the meaning of the interactive experience in its relation to the story. I describe a work-in-progress system called the <i>InterFace Portrait Storyteller,</i> in which participants use familiar gestures performed on a touch screen to explore the character's mind, which is constructed as a diegetic space. I also describe two interactive video installations, "One Measure of Happiness" and "Have I Lost My Plot?" within which the system interacts with either narrative or non-narrative approaches to the representation of diegtic space.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ben Shaul, N., Split Attention Problems in Interactive Moving Audiovisual Texts. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Digital Arts and Culture Conference. (DAC'03) (Melbourne, Australia, May 19--23, 2003). RMIT. http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/BenShaul.pdf, accessed: 14.6.2004
• 2: Bordwell, D., & Thompson:, K., Film Art: An Introduction (Fifth Edition), McGraw-Hill, NewYork, NY, USA, 1997, ch. 5.
• 3: Kevin M. Brooks, Do story agents use rocking chairs? The theory and implementation of one model for computational narrative, Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Multimedia, p.317-328, November 18-22, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/244130.244233]
• 4: Cameron, A., Dissimulations, http://www.daimi.au.dk/~sbrand/mmp2/Dissimulations.html, accessed: 14.6.2004
• 5: Cubit, S., Spreadsheets, Sitemaps, and Search Engines, Why Narrative is Marginal to Multimedia and Network Communication, and Why Marginality is More Vital than Universality. In Rieser, M., and Zapp, A., (Eds.) New Screen Media - Cinema/Art/Narrative, BFI, London, UK, 2002, 3--13.
• 6: Dekel, A., Knoller, N., Ben Arie, U., Lotan, M., and Tal, M., One Measure of Happiness - A dynamically updated interactive video narrative using gestures. In M.Rauterberg et al. (Eds.) Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT '03, IOS Press & IFIP, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2003.
• 7: Friedman, D., & Feldman, Y., Knowledge-Based Formalization of Cinematic Expression and Its Application to Animation. In Proceeding of Eurographics '02 (EG'02) (Saarbruecken, Germany, September 2-6, 2002), The Eurographics Association, Saarbrucken, Germany, 2002, 163--168
• 8: Mateas. M., A Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Interactive Drama. In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2001, Art Gallery, Art and Culture Papers, (LA, CA, USA, August 12-17, 2001) ACM Press, New York, NY, 2001, 51--58. http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/gallery/S01/essays/0382.pdf accessed: 23.4.2004

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.5 ARTS AND HUMANITIES
      Subjects: Fine arts

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.11 Software Architectures
            Subjects: Data abstraction

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Theory

Keywords:
communicative interaction, diegesis, expressive interaction, fiction, gestures, interactive storytelling, interactive video, intimacy, lingo, mind models, narrative, non-narrative, touch-screen, videogames