Steve DiPaola               SIGGRAPH ’01 EDU PANEL:  Designing Experience

Notes of Talk:               Avatars, Virtual Communities and Performance Worlds

 

Visiting Faculty at Stanford Art Dept, in SUDAC -  (Stanford Univ. Digital Art Center)

Now at TechBC contact me at  steve@dipaola.org  or  mailto:steve.dipaola@techbc.ca

 

At Stanford I wrote and delivered several courses that were:

       - Collaborative ( team based in style and content)
       - Experiential (emersed them in my research and mentored them to create their own event)
       - Interdisciplinary: mix of :

1) 2d /web arts     2) writers     3) 3d artists   4) programmers

 

Brought my research and the passion I feel for it to the course material and class.

 

I will describe one course – Interactive Digital Narratives

 

 

Topics for this courses included collaborative storytelling, 3D narrative environment creation, interactive dramatic structures, character development, virtual community constructs and online performance art.

 

I immersed the students for the 1st half of the course in theory and practice of the interactive narrative. We used Janet Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck” text. We had assignments in web narrative, interactive story design, hypertext narratives. But from the beginning I discussed my work in 3D virtual avatar communities and how they were building there own narrative creations. So we also became anthropologists and began analyzing this particular 3d voice based online community. With this knowledge, I explain to the class, we would put on a virtual play at the end of the course.

 

Major issues for the course were the new roles of author and audience and the    ownership/ control of the narrative.

 

Then for the 2nd half of the course – we became an ensemble performance group gearing up for a public event, which was more on the edge of interactive narrative and in my research area.

I explained we would now use our newfound interactive digital narrative skills by creating real-time dramatic performance art in virtual environments.

 

Again this related to my research in virtual worlds, specifically the work I did designing and implementing OnLive! Traveler ( www.onlive.com), which uses voice-based 3d environments with emoting lip-synced head avatars. See the SIGGRAPH sketch paper on traveler. Traveler has been used at Case Western Univ., Univ. of Texas at Austin, and currently in VR-based  psychotherapy.

 

The online community in Traveler is a very socially advanced and tight–nit. See the panel talk I did at Siggraph00 Panel Interactive Storytelling discussing the social aspects. The Major points are:

       - Bluring the lines of author and audience, community members create environments where their feelings literally become the bricks and asphalt of the community via their 3d space design.

 

 My goal was to extend the research for this virtual communities and interactive narrative into class curriculum

 

My role then changed from teacher to moderator/mentor (director) in 2nd half of the course. We split the class up into teams:

       - writers/actors,  

       - 2d/web artists,

       - 3d  space designers

 

The class did the following pre-work for the performance:

 

VR anthropologists: meeting and interview this online world and its community members.

Learned to make spaces and communicate via online instruction from world participants.

 

I equated the virtual community to a tight community of farmers in Iowa and the play to the class putting up a new barn one day and invite them  in ( to our performance).

 

 

See the performance site:  Stanford’s Alice  and the images of the event.

 

This was a public interactive narrative performance that combines environment, online audience and actors, dramatic structure and social community dynamics.

 

 Major issues are

 

       - scale: if a stage can be any size and shape in virtual space, what size makes sense for the narrative flow we were after.

       - flexibility: we do not control the full story, only the narrative flow, how must our play flex to the interactors pace.

       - augmented audience: how do we make the online play work for the physical audience at Stanford.

       - pulse: again we did not own all of the narrative but could affect  “narrative flow” “narrative push” and “narrative pulse”- how can we learn to use these new tools

       - assessment: how can we assess the play in real-time and make changes to it

 

In conclusion:

- trust the student – give them fundamentals

- let them experiment with you research

- moderating them and referring back to fundamental principals

Steve DiPaola                            steve@dipaola.org                    www.dipaola.org