Stories have long captivated the human imagination with narratives that enrich our lives. Traditional storytelling methods are often static and not designed to adapt to the listener’s environment, which is full of dynamic changes. For instance, people often listen to stories in the form of podcasts or audiobooks while traveling in a car. Yet, conventional in-car storytelling systems do not embrace the adaptive potential of this space. The advent of generative AI is the key to creating content that is not just personalized but also responsive to the changing parameters of the environment. We introduce a novel system for interactive, real-time story narration that leverages environment and user context in correspondence with estimated arrival times to adjust the generated story continuously. Through two comprehensive real-world studies with a total of 30 participants in a vehicle, we assess the user experience, level of immersion, and perception of the environment provided by the prototype. Participants' feedback shows a significant improvement over traditional storytelling and highlights the importance of context information for generative storytelling systems.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3654777.3676372
Shadow puppetry, a culturally rich storytelling art, faces challenges transitioning to the digital realm. Creators in the early design phase struggle with crafting intricate patterns, textures, and basic animations while adhering to stylistic conventions - hindering creativity, especially for novices. This paper presents Lumina, a tool to facilitate the early Chinese shadow puppet design stage. Lumina provides contour templates, animations, scene editing tools, and machine-generated traditional puppet patterns. These features liberate creators from tedious tasks, allowing focus on the creative process. Developed based on a formative study with puppet creators, the web-based Lumina enables wide dissemination. An evaluation with 18 participants demonstrated Lumina's effectiveness and ease of use, with participants successfully creating designs spanning traditional themes to contemporary and science-fiction concepts.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3654777.3676426
Efforts to expand the authoring of visual stories beyond the 2D canvas have commonly mapped flat imagery to 3D scenes or objects. This translation requires spatial reasoning, as artists must think in two spaces. We propose PortalInk, a tool for artists to craft and export 2.5D graphical stories while remaining in 2D space by using SVG transitions. This is achieved via a parallax effect that generates a sense of depth that can be further explored using pan and zoom interactions. Any canvas position can be saved and linked to in a closed drawn stroke, or "portal," allowing the artist to create spatially discontinuous, or even infinitely looping visual trajectories. We provide three case studies and a gallery to demonstrate how artists can naturally incorporate these interactions to craft immersive comics, as well as re-purpose them to support use cases beyond drawing such as animation, slide-based presentations, web design, and digital journalism.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3654777.3676376
We introduce DrawTalking, an approach to building and controlling interactive worlds by sketching and speaking while telling stories. It emphasizes user control and flexibility, and gives programming-like capability without requiring code. An early open-ended study with our prototype shows that the mechanics resonate and are applicable to many creative-exploratory use cases, with the potential to inspire and inform research in future natural interfaces for creative exploration and authoring.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3654777.3676334
Large language models (LLMs) can help writers build story worlds by generating world elements, such as factions, characters, and locations. However, making sense of many generated elements can be overwhelming. Moreover, if the user wants to precisely control aspects of generated elements that are difficult to specify verbally, prompting alone may be insufficient. We introduce Patchview, a customizable LLM-powered system that visually aids worldbuilding by allowing users to interact with story concepts and elements through the physical metaphor of magnets and dust. Elements in Patchview are visually dragged closer to concepts with high relevance, facilitating sensemaking. The user can also steer the generation with verbally elusive concepts by indicating the desired position of the element between concepts. When the user disagrees with the LLM's visualization and generation, they can correct those by repositioning the element. These corrections can be used to align the LLM's future behaviors to the user's perception. With a user study, we show that Patchview supports the sensemaking of world elements and steering of element generation, facilitating exploration during the worldbuilding process. Patchview provides insights on how customizable visual representation can help sensemake, steer, and align generative AI model behaviors with the user's intentions.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3654777.3676352
Designing cinematic compositions, which involves moving cameras through a scene, is essential yet challenging in filmmaking. Machinima filmmaking provides real-time virtual environments for exploring different compositions flexibly and efficiently. However, producing high-quality cinematic compositions in such environments still requires significant cinematography skills and creativity. This paper presents Cinemassist, a tool designed to support and enhance this creative process by generating a variety of cinematic composition proposals at both keyframe and scene levels, which users can incorporate into their workflows and achieve more creative results. At the crux of our system is a deep generative model trained on real movie data, which can generate plausible, diverse camera poses conditioned on 3D animations and additional input semantics. Our model enables an interactive cinematic composition design workflow where users can co-design with the model by being inspired by model-generated suggestions while having control over the generation process. Our user study and expert rating find Cinemassist can facilitate the design process for users of different backgrounds and enhance the design quality especially for users with animation expertise, demonstrating its potential as an invaluable tool in the context of digital filmmaking.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3654777.3676393