The Center for Games and Playable Media (CGPM) and the Expressive Intelligence Studio invites applications from outstanding individuals for a Senior Technical Lead/Project Scientist position. We’re starting a new research project to create the next generation of interactive storytelling technology: autonomous characters, social simulation, and story management. The goal is to take as big a step beyond the interactive drama Facade as it took from previous efforts. Please see the following link for more information: http://games.soe.ucsc.edu/immerse-project-job-opening. Both applicants with Ph.D.s and research experience and applicants without Ph.D.s but with industry experience are encouraged to apply.
The project, IMMERSE, is funded under the DARPA Strategic Social Interaction Modules program. The goal of the project is to produce a game-based training environment that teaches people how to be “good strangers”, supporting the practice of skills necessary to have successful social interactions when in novel culture and language contexts. This will be accomplished via virtual dramatic scenarios, realized within the Unity game engine, in which the player interacts with computer-controlled autonomous characters in high-consequence social environments, learning how to quickly recognize and navigate the social interactions norms in these environments. At UC Santa Cruz, the project is run within the Expressive Intelligence Studio, one of the research groups within the Center for Games and Playable Media. Our approach will build upon the autonomous character and story management technologies successfully demonstrated in the interactive drama Facade, and the social simulation system successfully demonstrated in the experimental game Prom Week. Both these games were previously developed within the Expressive Intelligence Studio. The UC Santa Cruz team will be coordinating with four other teams working on IMMERSE – the other teams are developing the pedagogical AI, the full-body immersive interface, and art assets.