The "Coming Home" project at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies was started in 2009 to research how virtual worlds could facilitate health care activities for returning US military personnel, who frequently suffer from psychological and physical challenges. These challenges include increased stress and loss of self-esteem related to the war events they have experienced. As part of the activities of Coming Home, we implemented an ambitious storytelling activity that reinforces the positive ideals for which a warrior stands, by presenting historical figures from the past that illustrate those qualities. The storytelling includes scenes from a warrior's life, and a conversational avatar agent that can answer questions about the historical parts of the story. We have also created an interactive authoring system to allow users to make their own story to populate the SL storytelling space. Although visualized and experienced in world, the authoring tools and repository for most of the narrative content are web-based. Scripts within Second Life fetch this authored data and media and display it in the appropriate places. We also report on progress in building a tool with which users can author their own storytelling agent as part of the story they create.

The Virtual Museum Guides are two virtual humans set in an exhibit at the Museum of Science, Boston, designed to promote interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The primary audience is children between ages 7 to 14, in particular females and other groups under-represented in STEM.The Guides are based on and extend the approach used in the SGT Star character and the Gunslinger project. To interact with the characters, an operator presses a push-totalk button and speaks into a microphone. An audio acquisition client then sends audio to the automatic speech recognizer (ASR), which creates hypotheses of the words that were said, and then sends this text to the Language Understanding (LU) module.

The Sensory Environments Evaluation (SEE) Project seeks to formulate a new design methodology for virtual environments that utilize multiple sensory inputs to induce presence. Deviating from virtual reality's twenty-year focus on photo-realism, our "feels-real" design alternative aims directly at understanding the interdependencies of sensory stimuli in their creation of mental constructs, and the subsequent degree of realism perceived.

The Institute for Creative Technologies is a federally funded research center set up three years ago at the University of Southern California to advance the state of the art in immersive training. Teaming researchers in artificial intelligence, graphics, animation and immersive audio with Hollywood writers, directors and special effect artists, the ICT brings a unique mix of high-technology and professional storytelling esthetic to the problem of creating compelling immersive environments. This afternoon tutorial will consist of a panel presentation by top ICT affiliated researchers to discuss this wide range of technologies and skills and how they relate to the design of virtual environments. The panel will be followed by a tour of the ICT facilities and demonstrations of several virtual training systems.