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An event-centric approach to authoring stories in crowds

Published: 10 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

We present a graphical authoring tool for creating complex narratives in large, populated areas with crowds of virtual humans. With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, our system enables an untrained author to assemble story arcs in terms of narrative events that seamlessly control either principal characters or choreographed heterogeneous crowds within the same conceptual structure. Smart Crowds allow groups of characters to be dynamically assembled and scheduled with ambient activities, while also permitting individual characters to be selected from the crowd and featured more prominently as an individual in a story with more sophisticated behavior. Our system runs in real-time at interactive rates with no pause or costly pre-computation step between creating a story and simulating it, making this approach ideal for storyboarding or pre-visualization of narrative sequences.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)From Words to Worlds: Transforming One-line Prompts into Multi-modal Digital Stories with LLM AgentsProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games10.1145/3677388.3696321(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
  • (2023)The Authoring Tool Evaluation ProblemThe Authoring Problem10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_19(303-320)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2023
  • (2022)Authoring Virtual Crowds: A SurveyComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1450641:2(677-701)Online publication date: 24-May-2022
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MIG '16: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Motion in Games
    October 2016
    202 pages
    ISBN:9781450345927
    DOI:10.1145/2994258
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 10 October 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. crowd animation
    2. crowd authoring

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    MiG '16
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    MiG '16: Motion In Games
    October 10 - 12, 2016
    California, Burlingame

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    Overall Acceptance Rate -9 of -9 submissions, 100%

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    View all
    • (2024)From Words to Worlds: Transforming One-line Prompts into Multi-modal Digital Stories with LLM AgentsProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games10.1145/3677388.3696321(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
    • (2023)The Authoring Tool Evaluation ProblemThe Authoring Problem10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_19(303-320)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2023
    • (2022)Authoring Virtual Crowds: A SurveyComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1450641:2(677-701)Online publication date: 24-May-2022
    • (2021)Synthesizing affective virtual reality multicharacter experiencesComputer Animation and Virtual Worlds10.1002/cav.200432:3-4Online publication date: 24-May-2021
    • (2020)Generation of small groups with rich behaviors from natural language interfaceComputer Animation and Virtual Worlds10.1002/cav.196031:4-5Online publication date: 24-Aug-2020
    • (2019)Multi-constrained authoring of occupant behavior narratives in architectural designProceedings of the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design10.5555/3390098.3390132(1-8)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2019
    • (2019)Joint Parametric Modeling of Buildings and Crowds for Human-Centric Simulation and AnalysisComputer-Aided Architectural Design. "Hello, Culture"10.1007/978-981-13-8410-3_20(279-294)Online publication date: 21-May-2019
    • (2019)Coupling agent motivations and spatial behaviors for authoring multiagent narrativesComputer Animation and Virtual Worlds10.1002/cav.189830:3-4Online publication date: 26-Jun-2019
    • (2018)Interactive spatial analytics for human-aware building designProceedings of the 11th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games10.1145/3274247.3274503(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2018
    • (2017)An event modeling language (EML) to simulate use patterns in built environmentsProceedings of the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design10.5555/3289787.3289808(1-8)Online publication date: 22-May-2017
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