The story is the richest heritage of human civilizations. One can imagine the ?rst stories being told, several thousand centuries ago, by wise old men huddled around camp?res. Since this time, the narrative process has been considerably developed and enriched: sounds and music have been added to complement the speech, while scenery and theatrical sets have been created to enhance the story environment. Actors, dancers, and technicians have replaced the lone storyteller. The story is no longer the sole preserve of oral narrative but can be realized in book, theatrical, dance, or movie form. Even the audience can extend up to several million individuals. And yet in its many forms the story lies at the heart of one of the world's most important industries. The advent of the digital era has enhanced and accelerated this evolution: image synthesis, digital special e?ects, new Human-Computer interfaces, and the Internet allow one not only to realize more sophisticated narrative forms but also to create new concepts such as video gaming and virtual environments. The art of storytelling is becoming evermore complex. Virtual reality o?ers new tools to capture, and to interactively modify the imaginary environment, in ever more intuitive ways, coupled with a maximum sensory feedback. In fact, virtual reality technologies o?er enhanced and exciting production possibilities for the creation and non-linear manipulation in real time, of almost any story form. This has lead to the new concept of Virtual Storytelling.

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Inhalt
New Techniques.- Under Construction in Europe: Virtual and Mixed Reality for a Rich Media Experience.- Generation of True 3D Films.- Spatial Sound Enhancing Virtual Story Telling.- The VISIONS Project.- Programming Agent with Purposes: Application to Autonomous Shooting in Virtual Environment.- Interactive Immersive Transfiction.- Authoring Tools.- Interactive Storytelling: People, Stories, and Games.- An Authoring Tool for Intelligent Educational Games.- Generation and Implementation of Mixed-Reality, Narrative Performances Involving Robotic Actors.- A New Form of Narration.- Film and the Development of Interactive Narrative.- Virtual Storytelling as Narrative Potential: Towards an Ecology of Narrative.- Adaptive Narrative: How Autonomous Agents, Hollywood, and Multiprocessing Operating Systems Can Live Happily Ever After.- Virtual Characters.- Learning in Character: Building Autonomous Animated Characters That Learn What They Ought to Learn.- Real Characters in Virtual Stories.- Real-Time Character Animation Using Multi-layered Scripts and Spacetime Optimization.- Characters in Search of an Author: AI-Based Virtual Storytelling.- Virtual Agents' Self-Perception in Story Telling.- Applications.- Reflections from a Hobby Horse.- DocToon© A Mediator in the Hospital of the XXIst Century.- The Interplay between Form, Story, and History: The Use of Narrative in Cultural and Educational Virtual Reality.- Virtual Storytelling of Cooperative Activities in a Theatre of Work.- Virtual Storytelling for Training: An Application to Fire Fighting in Industrial Environment.- Computer Animation and Virtual Reality for Live Art Performance.- Virtual House of European Culture: e-AGORA.