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The Liquid Narrative group is doing fundamental research on procedural content generation in games and other interactive virtual environments. Our work involves planning and plan recognition, computer-mediated communication, natural language discourse generation and the integration of AI techniques into virtual reality. Much of the work we do centers around the computational modeling of interactive narrative.

Here's a short description of the group's research program [read it here].

For a good scientific overview of our research model, see:

Story and discourse: A bipartite model of narrative generation in virtual worlds by R. Michael Young, to appear in Interaction Studies, 2006.


Here is a list of current and past projects


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Bowman


Bowman is a graphical user interface for building planning domains. Bowman is targeted at users who are storytellers rather than technologists, though versions of Bowman provide functionality and interface design that is ideal for software developers


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Boyer

 

 


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Crossbow


Crossbow is a C# implementation of the DPOCL planning algorithm described below.

 


   

Crosswind and Kyudo


Crosswind and Kyudo are services that monitor user activities within a virtual environment and adapt astory's structure so that the user's experience within the story remains coherent, even when the user deviates from the intended storyline.


   

DPOCL


DPOCL, a decompositional POCL planner; a domain-independent AI planning system that generates both hierarchical and non-hierarchical plans. It incorporates techniques from partial-order, causal link planning approaches directly into a hierarchical framework.


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Fletcher


Fletcher, a web service for plan generation. Fletcher is an integral part of Zocalo, the service-oriented architecture for intelligent control of virtual environments (described below).

 


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IPOCL


IPOCL, a planner that generates stories with coherent, intentional character action.

 


   

HI-FIVES


HI-FIVES s a project to help high school and middle school teachers and Students harness the power of video games for learning science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We’re using Valve Software’s Source engine to build a simple-to-use, game construction tool for science and math games.

 


   

Longboard


Longboard is an automatic 3D dynamic storyboarding tool. Longboard users sketch storyboards and build screenplays using a tablet-based interface; the tablet application connects to powerful web-based AI services that plan the details of each scene based on user input and render the scene using the Source game engine.

 


   

Longbow


Longbow is the first extension to the DPOCL planning system(see above) and is targeted specifically for discourse planning applications. Longbow is a discourse planning system built on a theory of communication as planned, intentional action. Longbow's semantics, based on DPOCL's action representation, are clean and well-structured and can be used to characterize important aspects of discourse structure.

 


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mimesis


Mimesis, the predecessor to Zocalo, provided a component-based architecture to control user interaction within games and other virtual worlds.

 


   

Virtuoso


Vituoso is a tool for tool for building multi-user 3D games. Virtuoso's design helps novice programmers and designers work together in teams to build a game world and add custom behaviors to the objects in it. Virtuoso is built on top of Valve Software's Source engine..

 


   

Zocalo


Zocalo is a service-oriented architecture for control of interactive narrative systems in virtual environments. A number of subsystems or stand-alone tools have been defined within the Zocalo project and are described below.

 

 

 

 
 

CSC seeks new faculty in game development [read more]

Jhala passes oral exam!

Lockheed/Martin buys 3DSolve [read more]

 

   
       
  Events    
 

The Future of Games speaker series set to roll. [read more]

Niehaus to give his dissertation proposal on January 23rd at 1:00PM.

Spring 2008 kick-off group meeting 11:00AM Wednesday, January 9