Automated creation of movie summaries in interactive virtual environments

Virtual environments and artificial worlds are becoming multi-user, complex, and long lasting. Someone who was away from the environment for a while may wish, to be informed of interesting events that happened during her absence without watching hours or even days of interaction. A movie is the natural medium for such a summary. A t the end of a long interaction, participants may wish for such a movie as a keepsake. However, creating a movie summary of a given set of events is delicate, complicated, and time-consuming. In this paper we discuss some of the issues involved in creating a tool that can create such movie summaries automatically. We describe the stages in transforming a chronicle of events into a movie and present an implementation of such, a system. We show results of transforming a log from a life-simulation game to a movie script.