A System for Creating, Sharing and Listening to Interactive Stories

Abstract: Perhaps nothing explains the concept of interactive stories better than The road not taken by Robert Frost. His poem tells the story of a man following a road through the woods, when he comes to a fork in the road. Which way should he go? And how will this choice affect the rest of his life? In an interactive story, the author expands their story along multiple branches, and invites the reader to choose for themselves which path to take. They can also restart the story to go back and see what would lie down that other road. When an interactive story is played on a smartphone, there are additional ways of making those choices besides simply using vocal input. For example, going left or right at a fork in the road could be done by walking left or right, so that the phone's positioning service detects a change in position. A long journey could require the user to wait until the next day to find out what happens.  Based on an existing system for creating and playing interactive stories, we added new interaction possibilities for the listener and made the creation of stories easier by improving the user interface and adding features.