Full-Body Gesture Interaction with Improvisational Narrative Agents

Interactive narrative research strives to allow humans and intelligent agents to co-create narratives in real-time as equal contributors. While intelligent agents can interact with humans through expressive embodied representations, typical interactive narrative interfaces provide humans no way to reciprocate with embodied communication of their own. This disparity in interaction capabilities has been informally discussed as the human puppet problem. Improvisational theatre (improv) provides a real-world analogue to embodied co-creative interactive narrative experiences. This paper presents an overview of a system for combining improvisational acting with full-body motions to support human-AI co-creation of interactive narratives. The human begins an improvised narrative with an AI improviser while an intelligent avatar mediates interaction and gives the human an embodied presence in the scene.