An authoring tool for modeling the narrative flow in a virtual training application

The use virtual environments in training applications has the potential to provide rich training experiences to students, but it is difficult to design and manage such training sessions in real time due to the number of parameters to pay attention to: timing of events, difficulty, user’s actions and their consequences or eventualities are some examples. Narrative driven scenario managers confront this issue by generating dynamically these variables, making different each time the user plays a scenario. However, leaving the control to such systems makes the training difficult to predict, and in the case of training or learning applications the designer may have specific goals to introduce in the session. For that purpose, we have designed an authoring tool for our virtual narrative application used for training biohazard procedures. Our system contains a Narrative Manager that controls the simulation deciding which events will take place, and when, by controlling the narrative balance of the session. Our authoring tool allows the designer to specify a narrative curve and the Narrative Manager adapts the narrative flow of events to that curve. Thus, we provide a method to model the training’s narrative intensity without having to specify the ordering of each concrete event or numerical parameters each time we want to control some aspect of the dynamic generated session.