The Microsoft Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) research project aims to combine traditional forms of storytelling with new visualization technologies to create compelling interactive digital narratives. The RIN project is an undertaking by Microsoft Research India in collaboration with the Interactive Visual Experience group in Microsoft Research Redmond and the Microsoft Research Connections.
History
The RIN technology has its origins in the Sri Andal Temple project in 2008 (video). The temple demo featured an application that led users through an immersive, interactive, narrated walkthrough that included Photosynth and HD View stitched images of a temple in Tamil Nadu. Several core RIN concepts such as Experience Streams and Generalized Trajectories originated in that project.
Technology
The Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) technology consists of:
- The RIN Semantic Representation— a structured, extensible, and platform-independent data model with execution semantics (its XML manifestation can be considered a kind of "HTML for RINs")
- A Silverlight RIN player
- Silverlight plugins for foundational Experience Streams, each of which brings a specific visualization experience (such as maps, panoramas, Deep Zoom images) into the realm of RINs
- Authoring tools to create RIN content
While we have invested in a Silverlight player and plugins, there is nothing in the technology that precludes creating a player and plugins for other platforms, such as HTML5/JavaScript.
- Kenji Takeda, Graeme Earl, Jeremy Frey, Simon Keay, and Alex Wade, Enhancing research publications using Rich Interactive Narratives, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A , The Royal Society, 10 December 2012
- Kenji Takeda, Graeme Earl, Jeremy G. Frey, Simon Keay, and Alex Wade, Enhancing Research Publication using Rich Interactive Narratives, September 2011
- neeharika adabala, naren datha, joseph joy, Chinmay Kulkarni, Ajay Manchepalli, Aditya Sankar, and Rebecca Walton, An Interactive Multimedia Framework for Digital Heritage Narratives, in ACM Multimedia 2010, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 25 October 2010
- Aditya Sankar, Ajay Manchepalli, Chinmay Kulkarni, Joseph Joy, Naren Datha, Neeharika Adabala, and Rebecca Walton, An Interactive Multimedia Framework for Digital Heritage Narratives, no. MSR-TR-2010-101, 24 July 2010
- Aditya Sankar, Archana Prasad, Joseph Joy, Naren Datha, and Ajay Manchepalli, Digital Heritage Video Showcase, in ACM CHI 2009, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 4 April 2009
