Spatial Cues in Hamlet.

Many games, films, and virtual environments are very scripted, or use very canned/explicit cut scenes for characters to interact. This requires extensive work for producing new scenes, actions, and other scripts for these environments. It also usually comes with a certain level of expertise in lower-level character control. Current research focuses primarily on the conversational and non-verbal domains of this issue. However, with the growing focus on realistic virtual environments, the spatial domain is becoming a more critical component in creating that realism. Tools and markup languages, such as Behaviour Markup Language (BML), Functional Markup Language (FML), and BML Realizers are making it possible to abstract the control of virtual characters to a certain extent. Unfortunately, these methods still require a level of expertise and time that can be unreasonable. Therefore, we propose a higher level of abstraction to ease this authorial burden for new scenes and actions in games. To do this, we look to another example of scripted activities that has been used for hundreds of years: play-scripts. We took the fully annotated play-script for Gielgud's Hamlet in 1964, along with the recording of the same play to create a baseline using BML. We compared this to the use of just the play-script and some very simplistic natural language processing to block the same act of the same play. The results of this comparison show a savings of over four hours for authoring spatial scripts, while maintaining similar spatial blocking.