The Trial The Trail, Act 3: A Virtual Reality Drama Using Intelligent Agents

The Trial The Trail is an interactive drama running on an immersive VR system. Imagine Tarkovsky’s Stalker, crossed with Alice Through the Looking Glass, crossed with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Now imagine embarking on a guided journey through this warped yet familiar landscape. Your guides are two intelligent agents, Patofil and Filopat. We consider a virtual reality drama to be a scripted play in which the computational agents are actors who have copies of the script, and one human audience member has been drafted to be a participant, but doesn’t have a copy of the script. The computational actors must improvise reactions to the human participant’s actions, but keep the play moving along in as close agreement to the script as possible. The goal is to provide the human participant with a specific emotional experi-