Active Storytelling

People love to exchange stories. Stories provide a context for the events, feelings, ideas, and relationships that make up the fabric of our daily lives. When we describe an important experience in our life to another person, we often shape it in the form of a story. Stories are a means of communication. We are on the threshold of a revolutionary change in how people will communicate with each other and the environment. A global wireless communications network, coupled with computational devices that know where they are and are in contact with the network, will knit together individuals and groups in ways we have never seen before. These devices will employ speech recognition and synthesis, algorithms for vision understanding and graphic synthesis, and algorithms to extract meaning from text, images, and sounds. When these devices mature, they will be small, portable, wireless, and ubiquitous. They will have a deep impact on our cultures, and our stories. These technologies will not eliminate other, more traditional media, just as television did not eliminate film, and film did not eliminate novels. But they will open the door to new kinds of stories that can be told in new ways. Because these new approaches will rely heavily on underlying technologies, it is exciting to try to anticipate new ways of storytelling, in the hope that we can influence the development and engineering of those technologies to keep the doors of possibility and exploration wide open.