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INSCAPE - Interactive Storytelling for Creative People

INSCAPE aimed at enabling ordinary people to use and master the latest Information Society Technologies for interactively conceiving, authoring, and experiencing interactive stories whatever their form, be it training simulators, animation, theatre, movie, puppet show, video-games, interactive manuals, etc.

Impact

The development of advanced tools for interactive storytelling is of paramount importance for the growing market in interactive programs and events, virtual environments, autonomous characters and applications based on narrative structures. The market for stories, from Web-based applications to advanced immersive environments and simulators is growing quickly. Interactive stories for education, training, infotainment, marketing or entertainment, expand the reach of computer-based systems beyond the already "saturated" 40% of the population who already use computers.

Main innovation

INSCAPE worked on generating and developing the knowledge in the emerging domain of Interactive Storytelling by researching, implementing, demonstrating and disseminating a complete suite of innovative concepts, tools and working methods tightly integrated in a homogeneous web-based framework and offering a full chain to people with no particular computer skills, from content acquisition and creation, organising, processing, sharing, and using all the way to experiencing, from creators to "viewers".

INSCAPE also tried to address issues such as the acquisition, the creation, the management and the sharing of interactive stories or their real-time multi-sensorial rendering combined with natural agent behaviours and multimodal interfaces. It worked on providing innovative natural interfaces and devices for intuitively creating or living interactive stories within multi-dimensional virtual, augmented and mixed realities.

From a technical point of view, INSCAPE tackled issues such as:

The ontology of stories or the specification of the story concept in either linear or non-linear forms,
The formal modelling of narrative skills, structures and patterns and their creation methodologies,
The formal modelling of behaviours, emotions and contextual feedback,
The creation of the story elements (objects, decors, etc.) or their acquisition from reality,
The creation of virtual actors including both the morphological and physical aspects,
The direction of virtual actors in real time,
The inclusion of lifelike elements in the story. The creation of "realistic" behaviours and emotions,
The population of stories with autonomous actors and the management of their interactions,
The creation and management of non-linear and interactive scenarios,
The simulation and optimisation of production (lighting, actors direction, etc.) and shooting,
The creation of real-time special effects (explosion, fire, snow, rain, etc.) within a story,
The use of innovative natural interfaces (multimodal interface, force feedback systems, immersive displays, 3D sound, augmented reality) for creating, telling and experiencing interactive stories,
The new concepts for interactive storytelling addressing multiple "viewers",

Results

The first period spanning on Sept 2004 to August 2005 had three overall objectives related to the first iteration of the INSCAPE development cycle (Alpha release).

For the End-User Group, the work consisted in collecting, consolidating and analysing requirements for the first release of INSCAPE platform and defining the validation and demonstration scenarios;
For the Foundational Research Group, the aim was to produce state of the art and research reports to have the consortium aware of research and technological possibilities and current market assessment in terms of Interactive Storytelling;
For the Technical Group, the work planned was to specify software functions meeting user requirements, to define the architecture of both INSCAPE Software Development Kit (tools for building an INSCAPE component) and application and to develop the Framework.

The main results delivered during this period are:

The State of the art and research reports on Interactive Storytelling that have been used to stimulate and rank end-user requirements for the Alpha release and to further educate the consortium.
The End-user requirements eligible for the Alpha release which is due in May 2006, validation and demonstration scenarios on edutainment based on Mozart childhood and on Astronaut training based on an extra-vehicular activity around the International Space Station.
The Architecture, design, tools and hardware devices for the technology providers to develop INSCAPE Alpha application: Software Developer Kit and framework.
The organisation of the INSCAPE Open Community with 115 members from 30 countries. INSCAPE Open Community Invitation (PDF, 338KB)
The co-organisation of the third International Conference on Virtual Storytelling.
12 scientific papers published and presented at international conferences
The INSCAPE Website and other dissemination material (graphic charter, logo, flyer).

More details

Promotional video (WMV 15.3MB)
Presentations (PDF, 132KB)
Flyer presenting INSCAPE and sample stories (2008) (PDF, 2.615KB)
Annual Report 2008 (PDF, 1.001KB)
Annual Report 2007 (PDF, 231KB)
Annual Report 2006 (PDF, 1.085KB)
Annual Report 2005 (DOC, 62.5KB)
INSCAPE website

Administrative Details

INSCAPE (IST-2004-004150) is an Integrated Project of the European Union's 6th Framework Programme Thematic Priority 2 (Information Society Technologies). It was submitted under the strategic objective "2.3.2.7 Cross-media content for leisure and entertainment".
INSCAPE started on 1^st September 2004 and finished on 31^st August 2008.
The total project budget is 12.9 million €.

List of Participants

14 partners from 8 European countries were involved in INSCAPE.

Coordination: CS Systèmes d'Information, France
End-User Group
Foundational Research Group
Technical group

Contact Persons

Project management: Jérôme Duchon: Email: Jérôme Duchon; Tel: +33 561 176 536
Technical management: Philippe Pinto: Email: Philippe Pinto; Tel: +33 561 176 534
Scientific Direction: Dr Olivier Balet: Email: Dr Olivier Balet; Tel: +33 561 176 528

Events in connection with INSCAPE

They are more than 50 INSCAPE dissemination events, planned or that took place. Among them:

Virtual Storytelling'07, 5-7 December 2007 in Saint-Malo, France. The INSCAPE project supported the 4^th international conference on virtual storytelling. The theme was" Using Virtual Reality Technologies for storytelling".
IBC, 6-11 September 2007 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. INSCAPE displayed its latest developments with a booth at the New Technology Campus. Paul Kafno also presented the project with a paper entitled "Authoring for the Interactive Content Revolution" (Sept. 6 at 2:00 PM).
SIGGRAPH, the leading international event in computer graphics and interactive techniques, 7-9 August 2007 in San Diego, USA. INSCAPE presented their freshly released Beta version at the exhibition.
International Conference on Technologies in Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Oct 2006, Darmstadt, Germany
- TIDSE conference 2006 cover page (PDF, 308KB)
- TIDSE conference 2006 lecture notes (PDF, 36KB)
IST Event 2006, 21-23 November 2006 in Helsinki, Finland. A consortium member made a presentation in a session on Intelligent Content chaired by Roberto Cencioni, referred to INSCAPE and showed a section of the promotional video.
FIFA World Cup 2006, June 2006, Germany
International Conference on Virtual Storytelling 05, Nov 2005, Strasbourg, France
International Conference Television, Aesthetics and Reality, July 2005, Aveiro, Portugal

The exhaustive list is available on the website under News/Public events section in the INSCAPE website.