Follow the White Rabbit - English

Closed Human-Computer Interaction Computer Science Games Engineering Bachelor Master Ph.D. Project Thesis Games Research Lab

Background

The major advantage of transferring a tabletop role-playing game to a mixed reality tabletop game, such as the contributions of the XRoads project, is that the social situation of traditional tabletop games is preserved, while the automatic detection of the human players’ actions is facilitated. This recognition is paramount to reason about the game’s context in order to proactively advance in the story as well as to react in a believable manner. Previous work on storytelling agents demonstrated that the physical presence of the agent can increase the attention of listeners, and that their believability can be increased by multi-modal communication. Consequently, the combination of robot and role-playing game should provide a novel interesting gaming paradigm.

Tasks

The current version of the demonstration solely comprises recorded German voices for the robot game master. In this project, the robot’s performance is to be realized in two additional variants: (1) a recorded English performance of one actor and (2) an recorded English performance of several different actors. These variants are then to be compared in terms of their impact on game immersion experience and social presence. While it might be a better experience with different voices, it might brake the robot’s believably as a game master – who is a single person.

• get used to the current implementation done with the Visual Scene Maker tool
• find/recruit voice actors (e.g., from the theater group)
• record voice acting based on a given English script
• adapte the current implementation to
  • use the new audio files
  • consider potentially new timings for non-verbal behavior (e.g., facial expressions)
• prepare a user study assessing game immersion experience and social presence
• conduct the study
• analyze the obtained results

Introduction

Follow the White Rabbit is a demonstration showcasing a social robot that acts as a game master in an interactive tabletop role-playing game. In this project, the robot’s performance is to be realized in two additional English variants that are then to be compared in terms of their impact on two qualities of user experience.

Prerequisites

• Interest in autonomous agents
• Interest in novel interaction techniques
• Good command of the English language
• Minor practical programming skills
• Creativity

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg