Creating Broadcast Interactive Drama in an NVE

xploiting a networked virtual environment (NVE) architecture, we produced the gaming part of an interactive television drama series, Typo-Toons. For decades TV-showmakers have been inventing tools and tricks to enhance the stories they tell (slow motion, repeated action, various cameras, moving cameras, commentators, picture in picture, voiceover, graphics overlays, and so on). Equivalents of, and additions to, these conventional tricks in interactive media can only mature if multidisciplinary teams can obtain hands on experience of these newly emerging worlds. The production team for TypoToons and the interactively participating audience provided an excellent opportunity to develop such a team. Ten episodes of TypoToons were produced and broadcast during the last three months of 1999 on the children's Sunday morning schedule of VPRO Television in the Netherlands. TypoToons' production team incorporated a broadcast director, storywriters, graphics artists, animators, computer scientists, audio professionals, a television production crew, and interactively participating children. We used an extensible PC-based Architecture Net-worked Interactive Virtual Environment (PANIVE), 1 an architecture the company Androme developed to gain experience in setting up alternative applications in NVEs. 2 The episodes we created combined Web-interaction and interactive virtual environment techniques with the television medium. A typical episode had three phases in which the audience could participate before it was broadcast—an interactive session on the Internet, an animated children's drawings phase, and an interactive game phase in which four children, called the TypoTeam, interact within a 3D NVE. The first phase, the interactive session on the Inter-net, followed the broadcast program of the events of the previous week and lasted for about an hour. During this session storywriters create a story in which they regularly need assistance ('please suggest my next word'). For each episode, more than 100 children interact using a conventional Web browser interface. They score points by suggesting appropriate words. At the end of the session we invited the four children with the highest scores to join the TypoTeam in the interactive 3D game section during the following week. In the second phase, we invite children to create drawings based on the story created in the first phase and send them to the TV station. The animation production team uses the drawings to animate the story. The produced animation is broadcast the following weekend. In the third phase, the TypoTeam of four children work together to accomplish some task. Their success in each of four interactive networked games helps them …