The BBC Festival of Technology is an opportunity to experience and trial the latest ideas coming from BBC Research and its partners, through innovative ways that add excitement to content, and enhance the ways media are used.
During the demonstrations held at the BBC TV Centre, CALLAS mid term research work on affective iTV system was presented, to illustrate new paradigms for content that exhibit both rich narrative and rich interactivity in exploring interactive application having pseudo-emergent behaviour: e.g. so that it appears to have an open-ended storyline.
The approach explored open-ended interactive narrative techniques, making use of the emotional emphasis of user interactions.
The CALLAS highly experimental prototype system showcased content and behaviours based on an example narrative inspired from a comedy-thriller, where, on top of interactive narrative technology, a virtual character is introduced as a ‘co-spectator’, whose own emotional reactions to the story act as a catalyst to elicit user reactions.
User reactions are captured using emotional speech recognition as well as multi-keyword spotting.
Hence, the emphasis is more on users’ reaction than specific intervention or role-play.
For more information: Marc.Price@bbc.co.uk
