Bovary

IRIS Wiki - IS Systems - Bovary

Availability

Bovary is an IS system which was developed as a research prototype. It is not available for download.

Technical Description

Bovary IS system introduces a new approach to Interactive Storytelling, which aims at reconciling narrative actions with the characters’ attributed psychology as stated in the narrative. The long-term goal is to be able to explore Interactive Storytelling for those narrative genres which are based on the characters’ psychology rather than solely on their actions. The story representation makes use of the formalisation by Flaubert himself of his novel Madame Bovary, which includes a detailed account of characters’ desires and feelings.

It is a prototype in which characters’ behaviour is driven by a real-time search-based planning system applying operators whose content is based on a specific inventory of feelings. Furthermore, the actual pattern of evolution of the character’s plan, as measured through the variation of the search heuristic, is used to confer a sense of awareness to the characters, which can be used to generate feelings about its overall situation, from feelings of boredom to hope.

Bovary is fully integrated with a 3D real-time visualisation engine, using the UT2003 game engine.

Result Description (end user perspective)

Videos of several examples of the narratives generated by the emotional-based planning system can be viewed here. A specific example demonstrating user interaction can be viewed here

Authoring Description

The following paper provides a critical view on the creation of suitable IS authoring tools. It also provides a description of the processes involved in building the specific set of tools for the creation of plan-based narratives for the Bovary IS system.

• Pizzi, D. and Cavazza, M., 2008. From Debugging to Authoring: Adapting Productivity Tools to Narrative Content Description. First Joint Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), Erfurt, Germany, November 2008, pp. 285-296. [1]

Strong Points

• One step beyond action-based AI planners.
• Generativity of the emotional based planning system.
• Dramatisation of narrative situations.

Limitations

Control of the quality of the narrative generated is a typical issue in planning-based system.

Main Publications

• Pizzi, D. and Cavazza, M. (2007). Affective Storytelling Based on Characters' Feelings. AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies, Arlington, Virginia, November 2007. [2]
• Cavazza, M., Lugrin J-L., Pizzi, D., and Charles, F. (2007). Madame Bovary on the Holodeck: Immersive Interactive Storytelling. ACM Multimedia 2007, Augsburg, Germany. [3]
• Cavazza, M., Pizzi, D., Charles, F., Vogt, T., André, E. (2009). Emotional Input for Character-based Interactive Storytelling. The Eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), Budapest, Hungary, May 2009, pp. 313-320. [4]

Supporting Narrative Theories

Bovary is strongly linked to a computational model of roles and influences between characters from Brémond.

Computational Model

Bovary relies on AI planning tools and techniques, namely HSP planner, based on STRIPS representation, prior to pddl.

Type of interaction

• Text-based NL input
• An extension of the system was developed using emotional speech input (EmoVoice) called EmoEmma