Papous: The virtual storyteller

Abstract

This paper describes the development of Papous, a Virtual Storyteller. Our ultimate goal is to obtain a synthetic character that tells stories in an expressive and believable way, just as a real human storyteller would do. In this paper we describe the first version of Papous, our virtual storyteller. Papous can be seen as a virtual narrator who reads a text enriched with control tags. These tags allow the storywriter to script the behaviour of Papous. There are four types of tags: behaviour tags, where a specific action or gesture is scripted; scene tags, that allows for Papous to change the scene where he tells the story; illumination tags, to allow a new illumination pattern of the scene; and emotion tags, to change the emotional state of Papous. The texts, enriched with these tags, are then processed by Papous’ different modules, which contain an affective speech module and an affective body expression module. In this paper we will provide details of the speech, gestures and environment control actions taken by each of the modules of Papous architecture. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.