SCENARIO is a 360-degree 3D cinematic installation whose narrative is interactively produced by the audience and humanoid characters with artificial intelligence (AI). It is inspired by the experimental television work of Samuel Beckett. A female humanoid character has been imprisoned in a concealed basement, along with her four children by her father, who lives above ground with his daytime family. Set within this underground labyrinth, she and her children take the audience through various basement spaces in an attempt to discover the possible ways they and the audience can resolve the mystery of their imprisonment and so effect an escape before certain death.

Dennis Del Favero and I co-founded
 the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of NSW in Sydney
 in 2002. While the development of the AVIE platform was one of its major undertakings, most of our research efforts were focussed on creating the new aesthetic formulations and content appropriate to the unique opportunities offered by interactive immersive visualisation environments. One such fundamental research topic was the narrative interaction between 
real people and machine agents (or virtual characters), and the merging of action within that continuum of real and represented spaces that AVIE’s 3D 360-degree projection could evoke. A number of installations were created that linked the real and the virtual within 
a theatre of emergent interactive narrative, including Hampi Live and, SCENARIO. 

SCENARIO is a 360-degree 3D cinematic installation whose narrative is interactively produced by the audience and humanoid characters with artificial intelligence (AI). It is inspired by the experimental television work of Samuel Beckett. A female humanoid character has been imprisoned in a concealed basement, along with her four children by her father, who lives above ground with his daytime family. Set within this underground labyrinth, she and her children take the audience through various basement spaces in an attempt to discover
 the possible ways they and the audience can resolve the mystery of their imprisonment and so effect an escape before certain death. 

Jeffrey Shaw

Australian Research Council Project Investigators: Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw, Steve Benford, Johannes Goebel

Australian Research Council Project Title: Co-evolutionary narrative as machine autonomy in the relationship between artificial agents and human participants in interactive cinema. 

Australian Research Council Discovery Project: DP0556659