Hi8us/Maverick eDrama student projects 2001/2

Maverick Television (www.mavericktv.co.uk) is an independent TV and film production company. Hi8us (www.Hi8us.co.uk) is a charitable sister organisation which uses drama as a tool for education and community development, particularly with young people. The school of Computer Science is working with Maverick and Hi8us to develop technologies to support eDrama and applications that demonstrate the potential of this approach. eDrama describes a number of ways in which technologies can be used to enable and support all forms of dramatic arts. The essence of the approach is the use of technology to augment and mediate the interaction between players - the goal may be act out a play, to improvise, to enable role play etc. The end may be educational, artistic, counselling etc

There are very clear analogies with computer games, CSCW, computer conferencing, chat rooms etc. and the projects are likely to draw upon ideas from these areas.

The projects listed below are just some of the ideas which would be suitable for projects. As usual, the projects can be done individually, but there may be opportunities for some group projects.

Whilst these are some of the ideas, there are many other ideas that could be explored. Whilst some of the projects focus upon building an infrastructure and could be viewed as conventional distributed computing applications, we are particularly interested in ideas that bring imagination and novel thinking.

In the first instance you should contact rjh but projects might be supervised by any of rjh, jab, whe, jlw, Nick Hawes or others

Frameworks for eDrama

The goal of this project is to develop underlying technical frameworks for eDrama. The aim will be to develop software and protocols which will support a wide range of styles and media. There will probably be a client-server architecture that will enable clients to support everything from purely text-based interaction through to video streaming and VR (these should probably use 3rd party tools). It is likely that there will be a separation between the underlying 'transport' level and the user interface (to allow pluggable UI, web, WAP etc. or software agents). The interaction might be synchronous or asynchronous. The agents may be people or software systems.

Synthetic Agents for eDrama

The goal here is to use AI techniques to implement agents. These agents might be bit part players following a script through to major roles whose behaviour and interactions are generated in response to the developing drama - or they might be props. There are examples, of varying sophistication, of this approach in computer games as well as in academic work.

User interfaces for eDrama

Drama involves several forms of interaction. Players need to be able to speak (through text or speech interfaces) and they need to be able to change location. There are also a range of more subtle interactions that would ideally be implemented (e.g. posture or tone of speech). Furthermore, there will be special roles (e.g. director) and constraints imposed by scripts etc. The aim of this project is to investigate the requirements, to build an appropriate (extensible) interface and to explore at least some of the more advanced features that might be required. It's important to recognise that the requirements may be very different to an interface for a word-processor or web-browser.
Text input is an important part of any eDrama systems. The aim of this project is to investigate ways in which this can be made more fluent and flexible. Two approaches that could be used are the use of 'stock phrases' (e.g. in a context a small set of plausible responses might be proposed to the user - these might be canned text through to the use of sophisticated metaphors) or the use of predictive text systems could be used. There are many other approaches that might be investigated - for instance, special interfaces for physically or cognitively impaired users or multi-language support.

Evolving avatars

The aim of this project is to use evolutionary programming techniques to evolve avatars for agents within the drama. There are some examples of this sort of approach in other domains: The user can control evolution through a few generations by rating potential avatars which will affect their probability of survival into the next generation and their probability of mating. The goal is that an unlimited range of individual avatars can be generated rather than users selecting from a set of stock ones.
The idea here is similar to the previous project except that it is the behaviour of the agents (synthetic actors or props) which is evolved. The features affected by the evolution could from individual rules through to high level emotions e.g. aggression, volubility etc.

Scriptwriter's workbench

The aim is to use the eDrama system not as an end in its own right but as a tool to allow a playwright or director to use it as a tool to explore their drama. They should, for instance, be able to record and replay what happens, unwind a performance and restart it, generate scripts and scenarios and so on. A large part of the project will involve spending time with directors, writers, teachers etc. in order to identify just what the processes are that they work through in developing a drama.

State-of-the-art in eDrama

The emphasis here is in researching the state-of-the-art in eDrama systems. There has been work on different aspects of eDrama, but there is also an increasing overlap with areas such as computer games, chat-rooms, CSCW and others. The project will involve developing an analysis of these areas and an agenda for future work. We would normally expect that there will be a prototype system (probably using a web interface) that will demonstrate some of the issues that have been discovered.

Robot Drama

This project will involve producing a robot drama. Rather than using real or virtual actors they will be simple robots that will act out the play on a stage. This might have purely novelty and publicity value, but it is also likely to be very useful as an educational tool or even for rehearsals. In the longer term there are real issues for the development of techniques within robotics.

Voice recognition and production

Voice input or generation has a wide range of possible uses. It could be used to give a voice to actors (real actors who input text or synthetic actors) or it could be used as a compression technique. The whole range of voice generation or recognition techniques could be explored using this domain as a test-bed. It is likely that 3rd party tools will be used to provide some of the functionality

CS application of eDrama

One of the School's aims is to promote the discipline to school children. eDrama has the potential to allow children to explore just what is involved in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence or in careers that might follow. The aim here is to develop a system which could be taken into schools as part of our outreach activities. It could be used both as a drama in its own right but also to raise awareness and enthusiasm among potential students (especially girls and young women).