Reality Tales: Facilitating User-Character Interaction with Immersive Storytelling

Abstract

Reality Tales is a platform to facilitate interaction with fctional story characters for readers (13-20 years). The platform leverages binaural audio and multi-voice narration for an immersive story experience. Several paradigms for interactive storytelling have emerged in recent years, involving sequence-based story generation with user inputs. However, the current work in this domain rarely applies to existing fctional stories, with defned characters and plots. Our work introduces voice-based conversational interaction with story characters as a novel dimension to digital interactive storytelling. Through a user-centered process and qualitative studies, we discover that providing users with the agency to directly converse with story characters about their lives makes the users invested in the storyline. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Empirical studies in HCI ; Empirical studies in interaction design; User centered design.