Reality Tales: Facilitating User-Character Interaction with Immersive Storytelling

ABSTRACTReality Tales is a platform to facilitate interaction with fictional story characters for readers (13-20 years). The platform leverages binaural audio and multi-voice narration for an immersive story experience. Several paradigms for interactive storytelling have emerged in recent years, involving sequence-based story generation with user inputs. However, the current work in this domain rarely applies to existing fictional stories, with defined characters and plots. Our work introduces voice-based conversational interaction with story characters as a novel dimension to digital interactive storytelling. Through a user-centered process and qualitative studies, we discover that providing users with the agency to directly converse with story characters about their lives makes the users invested in the storyline.