Key Action Technique for Digital Storytelling

Building story-based interactive systems are important for entertainment and education. In the storytelling system, a user can change the discourse of the story by talking with the character. The problem is that the scene goals in the realistic situations are complex and often multiple goals make effects to decide the current action. When a user asks something to the character, the character needs to arbitrate multiple goals based on the priorities, the current action plan, and the contents of the conversation. In this paper, we propose the method for controlling multiple temporal goals of the story character. The character controls its reaction to the user interactions by using temporal key action (TKA). TKA is a temporal sub-goal setting with time constraint and a priority value. When the TKA is newly added, the action sequences are interpolated using an action network. We created a story-based animation example in which the user can be a detective in the virtual London city.