The Oz team is the result of a collaboration betwen the Dept. of Computer Science and the Dept. of Drama at CMU. The initial mentor was Joseph Bates and the project gained wide recognition and publicity when Brenda Laurel mentioned it extensively in her clasic "Computers as Theatre".
OZ phylosophy - The crucial concept involved in the Oz Team is the "interactor". This concept was put into practice by having a naif actor interacting with the actual actors. These get their directions from the stage director in real time and as the play develops, through head-phones. On the other hand, the audience is in a separate room and can control the channel which commands the point of view. The points of view are the ones obtained by the cameras mouted on helmet-like devices that each actor carries. The team is currently focusing on "believable agents" that act and use natural language in a real-time animated, visual world.
The way in which the Oz Team influenced our work has to do with their emphasis on the phrase ``interactive drama''; on their own words, this is "the presentation by computers of rich, highly interactive worlds, inhabited by dynamic and complex characters, and shaped by aesthetically pleasing stories". In our final project, we want to stress the co-existence of the worlds that are crucial in the theoretical description of this interactive drama architecture: a simulated physical world, several characters, an interactor, a theory of presentation, and a drama manager.
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