alVRed Methods and Tools for Storytelling in Virtual Environments

In this paper, we motivate and present methods and tools we have developed to support the efficient creation of interactive, complex, non-linear content for storytelling in immersive virtual environments. We propose a hierarchical and parallel composition of the abstract story structure by the authors themselves to ensure the realisation of their vision of the VR scenarios in an unaltered form. The presented tools are namely the VR Authoring Tool, the VR Previewer, the AvangoTM StoryEngine, the ObjectFactory and the VR Tuner. With these tools, the formerly unstructured work-flow in the production process of virtual environment applications, including the contributions of customers, authors, modellers, programmers, and others, was significantly better organised by parallelising interdependent production tasks and providing a uniform platform to which all participants contribute and from which they receive information for their tasks. With the realisation of the demonstrator production 'Entropy' our concepts and implementation are validated. This production already showed that the tool set significantly improves the efficiency of the production process and the reliability of the implementation.