Evolutionary approaches to literature can take one of two directions. One is to ask what functions story-telling serves. The second is to ask what role cognitive mechanisms play in the production of story-telling. I argue that story-telling evolved as part of the group-bonding processes that are concerned primarily with limiting the freedom of movement of freeriders within society. I then exami...

The development of virtual story-telling is an ever ongoing process. As long as it does not perform on the same level as a human storyteller, there is room for improvement. The Virtual Storyteller, a project of the HMI department of the University of Twente, uses a Text-to-Speech application that creates synthetic speech from text input. It is definitely not a trivial matter to make synthetic s...

Art-making has always shared with archeology the challenge of digging for meaning. But, whereas the archeologist digs deeper and deeper to unearth the past, digital art adds layer upon layer, projecting images and ideas into the future. Art-making, like myth, taps into the archetypes we all share, reliving mental journeys via story-telling. As I create individual images, they flow, one into ano...

Although the use of images as well as movies has proven very valuable for presentation purposes in volume visualization, these methods still lack a certain feature, that has become state-of-the-art in other visualization areas, namely interactivity. Giving the consumers of a presentation more interactive freedom would allow them to further investigate the presented visualizations as well as to ...

The goal of this work is self-perception modeling of autonomous agents in virtual story telling. It’s inspired from work of psychologists and neuro-physiologists. From psychology , we use fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) to model and implement believable agents’ behaviours. These cognitive maps allow us to give not only sensation but also perception, in the sense that our agents perceive environment ...

Book Reviews another way to teach science—smaller, less spectacu-Telling the True Story of Biology lar, and until now, less-respected by the marketplace. That other way is to tell stories. I am convinced that all great teachers (and the Ameri-Discovery—Windows on the Life Sciences can scientific community has had its share), are storytell-By R.A. Lewis ers. I would also suggest that the most su...