In the world of visual storytelling, narrative development relies on a particular temporal ordering of shots and sequences and scenes. Rarely is this ordering cast in stone. Rather, the particular ordering of a story reflects a myriad of interdependent decisions about the interplay of structure, narrative arc and character development. For storytellers, particularly those developing their narratives from large documentary archives, it would be helpful to have a visualization system partnered with them to present suggestions for the most compelling story path.

Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness — the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource would afford completely novel ways for representing and reasoning about web users and people in general. This paper narrates the theory and technique of such a feat — the natural language text of 100,000 social network profiles were captured, mapped into a diverse ontology of music, books, films, foods, etc., and machine learning was applied to infer a semantic fabric of taste. Taste fabrics bring us closer to improvisational manipulations of meaning, and afford us at least three semantic functions — the creation of semantically flexible user representations, cross-domain taste-based recommendation, and the computation of taste-similarity between people — whose use cases are demonstrated within the context of three applications — the InterestMap, Ambient Semantics, and IdentityMirror. Finally, we evaluate the quality of the taste fabrics, and distill from this research reusable methodologies and techniques of consequence to the semantic mining and Semantic Web communities.

This paper introduces a model for producing common sense metadata during video capture and describes how this technique can have a positive impact on content capture, representation, and presentation. Metadata entered into the system at the moment of capture is used to generate suggestions designed to help the videographer decide what to shoot, how to compose a shot and how to index their video material to best support their communication requirements. An approach and first experiments using a common sense database and reasoning techniques to support a partnership between the camera and videographer during video capture are presented.

This sketch presents a new approach to improvising movies according to the inter-relationship between personal videos and the story of an experience. Textable Movie is a graphical interface that invites a storyteller of any age to compose and visualize movies, images and sound environments while writing a story; the system self-selects and self-edits movies in real time based on textual input from the teller. Textable Movie aims to exalt the imagination of its authors (writer, and film-maker) by immersing them in real time, in a co-constructed narration.

An interactive narrative is a story that is shaped by digital technology and that allows the dynamic presentation of scenes or sequences based on input from the user. In this paper we present a new foundation for interactive storytelling that allows a mobile user to interact with a story. The user is placed at the center of the story and the story comes to the user in transit. The behavior and actions of the user influence the scenes and sequences of the story the user experiences. The framework for this system is an ad-hoc network. Ad-hoc networks allow localized presentation of story elements to users who are in transit and able to receive story elements on a mobile device. Furthermore ad-hoc networks have the capability to be context-aware and respond to the physical and social context of the user both on an individual and group level. This mobile context-aware story form is a powerful format in the fields of education and entertainment. It allows the story to be connected with the surrounding environment and it allows the user to see cause and effect of individual and group behavior. In this paper we present an ad-hoc network story system and examine a case study of its use for a prototype mobile context-aware story.

We present a multimedia storytelling system that couples a tangible interface with a multiple viewpoint approach to interactive narratives. Over the centuries, stories have moved from the physical environment (around campfires and on the stage), to the printed page, then to movie, television and computer screens. Today, using wireless and tag sensing technologies, storytellers are able to bring digital stories back into our physical environment. The Tangible Viewpoints system explores how physical objects and augmented surfaces can be used as tangible embodiments of different character perspectives in an interactive tale. These graspable surrogates provide a direct mode of navigation to the story world, a means of bridging the gap between cyberspace and our physical environment as we engage with digital stories. The system supports stories told in a range of media, including audio, video, still image and text.In this paper, we first provide a context for Tangible Viewpoints based on research in the areas of tangible interfaces and interactive narratives. We then offer an overview of the Tangible Viewpoints functionality, and explain the design and implementation of the system. The current system has been used in two storytelling projects. We discuss each one, and look at how user feedback has affected or will affect further development. We conclude by suggesting several future applications for the Tangible Viewpoints interface.

Broadband wireless networks coupled with handheld computers and appropriate sensing technologies provide a channel for the delivery of mobile cinema. Mobile cinema changes the consumer experience of motion picture stories in that discrete cinematic sequences are delivered based on the consumer's location and the a story-real-time metric. The M-Studio authoring tool helps mobile story creators design, simulate and adjust mobile narratives. The tool provides the author with a graphical manipulation interface for linking content with a specific geographical space and a simulator allows the author to evaluate and iterate the content for continuity of story threads as they may be presented. The tool directly generates the code that is required for the server to deliver the cinematic sequences appropriately. This tool is discussed in the context of the two mobile narratives that have been created.

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No abstract available.