SOAP

In the soap-like story, the user can interact with a set of virtual characters. Through dialog interactions, the progress and outcome of the story can be influenced.

Publications:

• Birgit Endrass, Christoph Klimmt, Gregor Mehlmann, Elisabeth André, and Christian Roth, Exploration of User Reactions to Different Dialog-based Interaction Style, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2011), 2011
  
• Gregor Mehlmann, Birgit Endrass, Elisabeth André, Modeling and Interpretation of Multithreaded and Multimodal Dialogue, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2011), 2011.

Interaction with the system:

• Interaction devices: keyboard, mouse
• Input modalities: typed-text
• Output modalities: text-to-speech & nonverbal behavior of virtual characters

Application description:

In the scenario, the characters are involved in a romantic conflict. The user, who is represented by an avatar can approach the different characters, listen to their conversations and interact with them. In that manner, the user can either approach a group of girls, a group of guys, or a waitress that is working in a Virtual Beergarden. In order to save resources, dialogs take place only if the user is near the characters, otherwise idle dialog behavior is presented. Through observation and interaction, the user will learn that there is a love story secretly going on. Dependent on the user's interactions, the characters will reveal their love, ask for help and follow the user's advice. Different scenario endings were modeled, while the user can make a match between two persons of his choice.

For the realization of the SOAP scenario, several components were needed such as language understanding that parses the user's text input into abstract dialog utterances, a dialog model that controls the narrative flow of the story and a graphical representation holding the virtual characters as well as the user avatar.

Tools used for the application:

• Virtual Beergarden: The graphical representation is done in the Virtual Beergarden application which holds the characters and the virtual scenario.
  
• SceneMaker: Dialog modeling and the flow of the scenario is done using the SceneMaker tool.
  
• SPIN: The user's typed text input is parsed into abstract dialog utterances using the semantic parser SPIN.