Hi, I am Bhavya Chopra,
a Computer Science and Design Undergraduate at IIIT-Delhi.
I will be talking about our work on Reality Tales-
Facilitating User-Character Interaction with Immersive Storytelling.
This is a joint work by Khushali Verma, Sonali Singhal,
Utsav Singla and myself.
Recent studies in the domain of interactive storytelling involve user character interaction
by controlling story characters and elements to generate new stories.
Our work introduces a new aspect of conversational user-character interaction
for existing fiction stories.
Reality Tales is a platform to provide users in the age group of 13-20 years,
the agency to directly converse with story characters about their lives.
The platform has a voice controlled interface
and uses binaural audio narration for an immersive experience.
We followed the Double Diamond model in our study.
In phase-1, we first diverge through the survey and semi-structured interviews,
and then converge by gathering user requirements via thematic analysis.
In phase-2, we again diverge with ideation and prototyping,
and then converge to the proposed solution via user evaluation.
We conducted a survey to record the reading preferences of 118 participants.
They reported that character personality, dialogues and emotions
are the most noticeable traits of a character.
We used purposive sampling to recruit 16 key participants for our study,
based on their self declared interest in reading
and familiarity with audiobooks.
We categorized them as avid, average and non-readers.
We conducted semi-structured interviews with 9 key participants
to understand the relevance of character interaction.
We find that it can enhance the story experience
and help build relationships with the characters.
The participants refer to websites like Quora,
Fandom and Wikipedia after having read a story to learn more.
Next, we conceptualize Reality Tales via iterative prototyping.
For Low-fidelity prototyping,
we conducted a roleplay to simulate binaural audio narration,
as seen in the images on the left and in the center.
We use Wizard of Oz for voice based user-character interaction,
as seen in the image on the right.
Here, we present the High-fidelity prototype,
with arrows indicating the user-flow.
After having selected an excerpt,
the users can listen to the binaural narration from the player
and control the interface using voice commands.
They can talk to Harry Potter at any point during
or after the narration.
This diagram represents the technical architecture for Reality Tales.
We use speech recognition and synthesis APIs on the front-end,
whereas the back-end interacts with the IBM Max Question Answering Service,
to fetch an appropriate response that the character would provide
to the user’s question.
Following is a demonstration of the platform.
Participant: How are you, Harry?
Harry Potter: I am all good. How are you, mate?
Participant: Who is Hermione?
Harry Potter: Hermione is a good friend of ours.
We first met her in Hogwarts Express and found
she is sort of unfriendly.
[Participant smiles]
Participant: Who is the seeker?
Harry Potter: Seeker is a position in Quidditch sport.
There can be only one seeker per team,
and I was one for Gryffindor.
Seeker has to catch the snitch.
Participant: What is a snitch?
Harry Potter: Golden snitch is a very fast and the smallest ball
in Quidditch. It has silver wings and golden sized.
We conducted user evaluation via Concurrent Think Aloud sessions
and gathered the following insights and learnings.
User-character interaction fostered positive emotions.
The participants felt invested in the characters and the storyline,
with increased levels of empathy, satisfaction,
and connectedness to the characters.
Character interaction increases curiosity.
We observed that, while listening to a traditional audiobook,
the participants could think of 1.4 questions on an average,
with the median as 0 questions.
The questions were only based on the storyline and the excerpt they heard.
Whereas with Reality Tales,
the participants asked 6.4 questions on an average,
with the median as 5 questions.
Direct user-character interaction prompted the participants
to ask questions that were based on the character's lives,
other characters, story events and elements, and follow up questions.
We thank our participants for their involvement in the study.
Thank you very much, and we are happy to answer any questions.