Narrative event adaptation in virtual environments

• Authors: Karl E. Steiner;Jay Tomkins
• Venue: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
• Year: 2004

There is a tension between user and author control of narratives in multimedia systems and virtual environments. Reducing the interactivity gives the author more control over when and how users experience key events in a narrative, but may lead to less immersion and engagement. Allowing the user to freely explore the virtual space introduces the risk that important narrative events will never be experienced. One approach to striking a balance between user freedom and author control is adaptation of narrative event presentation (i.e. changing the time, location, or method of presentation of a particular event in order to better communicate with the user). In this paper, we describe the architecture of a system capable of dynamically supporting narrative event adaptation. We also report results from two studies comparing adapted narrative presentation with two other forms of unadapted presentation - events with author selected views (movie), and events with user selected views (traditional VE). An analysis of user performance and feedback offers support for the hypothesis that adaptation can improve comprehension of narrative events in virtual environments while maintaining a sense of user control.