At the Virtual Frontier: Introducing Gunslinger, a Multi-Character, Mixed-Reality, Story-Driven Experience

Gunslinger is an interactive-entertainment application of virtual humans that transforms an iconic Wild West movie scene into a vivid semblance of reality. The project combines virtual humans technology with Hollywood storytelling and set building into an engaging, mixed-reality, story-driven experience, where a single participant can interact verbally and non-verbally with multiple virtual characters that are imbedded in a real, physical saloon. The Gunslinger project pushes the frontier of virtual humans research by combining question-answering dialogue techniques with explicit story representation. It incorporates speech recognition techniques and visual sensing to recognize multimodal user input. It further extends existing behavior generation methods such as SmartBody to drive tightly coupled dialogue amongst characters. These capabilities strive to seek a balance between open ended dialogue interaction and carefully crafted narrative.