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Showing posts from October, 2016

Two talks: an introduction to the POEM lab; a survey paper on story generation

Principles of Expressive Machines Last week I gave a presentation to the first-year computer science grad student seminar on my research, AKA an introduction to the "Principles of Expressive Machines" (POEM) lab, because I am looking for students . This talk was my first attempt to organize my future research plans into something vaguely coherent and forward-looking (in more depth than my job talk described), so I thought I'd share the results of my efforts. Here are the slides: In the talk, I outline three research agendas: Narrative knowledge representation and generation Tools for game and interactive fiction design Social multi-agent system modeling The slides are not particularly verbose, but there should be enough in them to grant a sense of what I'm interested in. Story Generation Survey This semester, I'm teaching a course on Generative Methods, i.e. algorithms for producing creative artifacts -- such as stories. For the most part, stu

Augmenting reality without augmenting vision

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A common narrative that people tell about virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) goes something like this: "VR means total immersion in an environment, allowing a game designer to involve you directly in their completely hand-fabricated version of reality. It does this by completely supplanting your field of vision with a simulated 3D environment. AR, on the other hand, only supplants part  of your field of vision, allowing overlays of simulated objects and information atop what is otherwise seen normally in the world." The attentive reader will notice that one sense in particular was heavily emphasized in this explanation: vision. It seems like many people almost take it as a given that supplanting  or augmenting  reality means changing what we see  in a very literal way, and sometimes this idea becomes almost a magic bullet, as though manipulating vision is all it takes to create compelling experiences, as if a more convincing simulation of vision  is the main missing