Teatrix

IRIS Wiki - IS Systems - Teatrix

Availability

Teatrix demos and documentation are available at website.

Technical Description

Teatrix is made up of two main components; a world and agents. The world is a 3D stage divided into scenes and composed of animated (agents) and inanimated objects. The agents, intelligent synthetic characters, are the heart of the Teatrix system. An agent has 5 components controlling its behaviour; mind, body, effectors, sensors and inventory. The mind stores the agent's knowledge both about the world and itself. As well, the mind controls actions goals and the emotional state of the agent. The body is the agent's physical (2D) representation in the world. The effectors tell the agent how to perform an action and verifies that preconditions for the action are met, executes the action and finally updates the world according to the effects of the action. The sensors gather information about the changes to the world state and communicate them to the mind. The inventory is where an agent keeps all his possessions.

Result Description (end user perspective)

Teatrix is a 3D virtual environment for story created, targeted at 8-10 year olds to help them develop literacy skills. The environment helps children create a story where each character's behaviour can be controlled by a (live) participant. 3 modules exist, each corresponding with a phase of the learning/story writing cycle.

1. Backstage : create storyworld by choosing characters, scenes and props
2. On stage : this is the story creation phase. participants choose their characters and can then control the actions of that character.
3. Audience : in this module, the story that was played out can be watched as recorded movie

Strong Points

• It was tested in classrooms with children.
• Engagement and enthusiasm of users.
• Final result usable (and understandable) by children.

Limitations

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Main Publications

• Prada, R., Machado, I. and Paiva, A. (2000). TEATRIX: Virtual Environment for Story Creation. In proceedings of ITS 2000, Springer Verlag,2000.
• Machado, I., Brna, P., and Paiva, A. (2001) Learning by playing: supporting and guiding story-creation activities. In Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, San Antonio, TX, 2001, pp.334-342
• Machado, I., Paiva, A., and Prada, R. (2001). Is the Wolf Angry or... Just Hungry? In proceedings of Autonomous Agents 2001, ACM Press.
• Full list

Supporting Narrative Theories

The support and guiding mechanism of Teatrix is provided by the Director Agent along with SAGA. The definition of story, which determines how the system works, is based on Vladimir Propp's narrative morphology. As well, the roles available for the children to chose from are based on Propp's morphology.

Computational Model

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