Creating broadcasted interactive drama in a networked virtual environment

Abstract

This article reports on experiences of exploiting a networked virtual environment (NVE) architecture for implementing the gaming part of an interactive television drama series. The architecture used is an extensible PC-based Architecture Networked Interactive Virtual Environments (PANIVE), developed to gain experience in setting up alternative applications in NVEs. The interactive television drama series, TypoToons, supports episodes that combine Web interaction and interactive virtual environment techniques with the television medium. The experiment consisted of ten TypoToons episodes that were produced and broadcast during the last three months of 1999 on the children's Sunday morning schedule of VPRO Television in the Netherlands.