A Mad Tea Party: The user looks across the table at the Mad Hatter to her left, the Dormouse across from her, and the March Hare to her right. The Mad Hatter has just been splashed with tea by the user, causing the March Hare to laugh at the Hatter. The Dormouse is asleep, but will soon wake up from the noise.

This AR experience (designed by Emmanuel Moreno when he was a student in our IDT program) is based on “A Mad Tea Party,” a chapter from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (It too was implemented using Director, but prior to the development of the current DART system.) The user assumes the role of Alice and sits at the tea party with three interactive characters: the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, and the March Hare. The video-based characters, presented through the head-mounted display, appear to be seated at the same physical table as the user.
     

"Alice's Adventures[3.6M]"		   Alice implements simple procedural characters in order to make the experience interactive as well as immersive. Scripts written in Lingo describe procedural character behaviors, control the display of character actions, and manage property states.


For example, if the Mad Hatter needs to splash tea on the Dormouse, a Lingo script loads the appropriate video segments to show the Hatter turning towards the Dormouse, then splashing him with tea. In response, video clips of the Dormouse reacting and the March Hare laughing are loaded. When the action is completed, the properties for each character are updated, and new character states are set.

We describe this experiment in “Alice’s Adventure’s in New Media: An Exploration of Interactive Narratives in Augmented Reality" presented at CAST ’01, Bonn, Germany, September 21-22, 2001.

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