FP7 Network of Excellence - Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling
EU project - 2009-2011 -
IRIS
Topics
The IRIS project aims at creating a virtual centre of excellence that will be able to achieve breakthroughs in the understanding of Interactive Storytelling and the development of corresponding technologies.
- To extend Interactive Storytelling technologies in terms of performance and scalability, so that they can support the production of actual Interactive Narratives
- To make the next generation of Interactive Storytelling technologies more accessible to authors and content creators of different media backgrounds (scriptwriters, storyboarders, game designers)
- To develop a more Integrated Approach to Interactive Storytelling Technologies, achieving a proper integration with cinematography
- To develop Methodologies to evaluate Interactive Storytelling systems as well as the media experience of Interactive Narrative
Our contributions
The objective of this work package is to explore the use of declarative methods and the combination of off-line and real-time solving techniques for the maintenance of cinematographic idioms in accordance with narrative progression. Previous approaches to automate cinematography have addressed each of these aspects in isolation (e.g. allowed the declarative specification of camera shots for fixed lights and actors positions). By contrast IRIS will both develop a unified language for cinematographic expression that relates narrative goals directly to cinematographic templates, and configure cameras, staging and lighting concurrently in the real-time satisfaction of these goals.
Cinematography relates the interdependent problems of camera control, staging (the positioning of actors and other scene element) and lighting design. Current approaches to specifying cameras, staging and lighting are based on traditional modelling techniques founded on abstract mathematical notions (e.g. splines and velocity graphs) more or less hidden by high-level manipulators that allow positioning and animation of objects as well as cameras in a 3D world. The models and interaction processes are removed from cinematographic notions and instead we propose the use of optimization and constraint-based techniques to allow the explicit specification of a consistent cinematographic style.
Fully automating cinematography for interactive storytelling requires number of separate innovations both within and across the cinematographic elements (cameras, staging and lighting):
- The development of a descriptive framework for cinematographic idioms motivated by both cinematic practice and its relation to narrative goals.
- The development of a unified constraint-based declarative framework for the specification of lighting, camera and staging properties.
- The development of real-time solving techniques for static and dynamic camera, lighting and staging.
- Implementation of our theory of camera usage in cinematography through the development of a constraint-based framework for the declarative specification of multi-shot edits.
- Development and application of an evaluation methodology for virtual cinematography.
Some of our results
CNRS / NSC - Smart Motion Planning
CNRS PICS framework (joint with National Science Council, Taiwan) - 2009-2011
Topics
The main objective of this Franco-Taiwanese project is to provide the founding models and techniques that will enable the design of more intelligent (a new generation of) motion planners in virtual environments. These models are based on the automated extraction of topological information to build an informed abstract representation of the environment, that is used in turn to plan motions at symbolic levels rather than numeric and geometric levels. This reduces the complexity of the planning planning while augmenting its expressiveness.
Motion planning is a complex and critical problem that finds its application in a large range of problems. Results from the robotics field have long-time been projected onto planning problems in virtual spaces, and have been mainly adapted to character motion planning, object planning and camera path planning. There are numerous important applications of these techniques (crowd simulation for emergency siutations, creating intelligent behaviours in training and edutainment scenarii, dynamic target tracking, smart exploration and navigation in virtual environments, and virtual camera planning for storytelling) that would profit from more informed environements and a higher-level of reasoning.
This project proposes to make a fundamental and qualitative step in motion planning within virtual environments by integrating the computation and usage of topological and semantic information in the exploration of navigable search spaces. This will improve both the expressiveness and the realism of planning techniques, while reducing the load of hand-made inputs on raw geometry and the complexity.
Our contributions
To achieve these goals, the project is articulated around four major axes: (1) propose a semantic information scheme authorizing semantic abstraction of the environment, (2) combine the semantic model with the automatic topology extraction to provide a model enabling a coupled abstraction of both semantic and topological relations, (3) adapt planning techniques to include semantic and topological reasoning, (4) demonstrate the advantages provided by the method on two classes of problems: character navigation and camera planning.
The two primary steps rely on the knowledge of both French and Taiwanese partners to study the nature and levels of topologic and semantic information required for improving the planning. Teams will capitalize on the experience gained over the TopoPlan (Topological Planner) tool [Lamarche, 2009], designed by the French partners. This model provides an exact spatial decomposition scheme which automatically extract environment topology (areas, spatial relations). This model will be extended to take into account the semantics associated to the environment and to provide a multi-level abstraction.
We then propose to integrate the semantic and topological information at the heart of the planning technique by relying on the Taiwanese expertise. The planning will be performed at two levels, first by reasoning on the semantic and topological levels (\emph{e.g.} through the construction of extended aspect graphs), and second at the geometric levels. The dynamic aspects of the applications will require to design specific local and global reactive processes (\emph{i.e.} plan globally while reacting locally). Improved expressiveness can be enforced by using constraints, established on the different levels of abstract, to control the behaviour of the planning.
The last step consists in applying the proposed techniques to two specific and motivating problems in motion planning: camera and character control in cluttered environments, on which both partners have gathered experience. The partners will share their issues, example scenes and previous results, to provide an expressive framework for evaluating this approach.
This work takes place in a more general framework that tends to bring intuitive authoring tools, thereby delivering expressiveness and realism to people engagement in virtual 3D worlds. Better planning techniques through qualitative reasoning in 3D environments represents a strong move in this direction.
