Designing interactive storytelling: A virtual environment for personal experience narratives

Abstract

We describe an ongoing collaboration with the District Six Museum, in Cape Town, aimed at designing a storytelling prototype for preserving personal experience narratives. We detail the design of an interactive virtual environment (VE) which was inspired by a three month ethnography of real-life oral storytelling. The VE places the user as an audience member in a virtual group listening to two storytelling agents capable of two forms of interactivity: (1) User Questions: users can input (via typing) questions to the agent; and (2) Exchange Structures: the agent poses questions for users to answer. Preliminary results suggest an overall positive user experience, especially for exchange structures. User questions, however, appear to require improvement. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.