Luke Skarth-Hayley, a fourth-year Horizon CDT PhD student collaborating with BBC R&D, is exploring ways to create reactive narrative experiences in game engines that sit at the intersection of video games and television.
Luke has built a plugin for Unity game engine that enables “Reactive Mise-en-scène”. The environment, composition of objects, camera effects, and events in a given locale/scene are dynamically adapted based on player attention. Luke has also used the plugin to develop Cognitive Dissidents to explore these attention-driven narrative design possibilities.
Cognitive Dissidents is a reactive narrative experience where the viewer/player is drafted into a future “virtual jury duty” in which they explore the memories of a character who may or may not have committed a crime. This ‘experience’ is based on Luke’s PhD research, with his thesis title being Reactive Mise-en-scène.
Luke will be demoing Cognitive Dissidents as part of the Immersive Storytelling symposium for FACETS 2021 taking place at Lakeside Arts in Nottingham.
Tags: creative technologies, digital, digital storytelling
