Virtual Stage: a scenario-based karaoke system in a virtual environment

We describe our on-going work on Virtual Stage, a karaoke system which incorporates virtual reality technology. A runtime environment and authoring tools for interactive scenarios have been designed and implemented. We adopt a scenario-based representation to unfold a story in the virtual environment. A producer can make Virtual Stage applications which reflect his/her own scenario. While singing-along to the song played by Virtual Stage, the participants use their body to interact with virtual characters which behave intelligently in the virtual environment. The scenario written via authoring tools describes the interaction between the participant and virtual characters. The system analyzes video images of the participant to extract participant-related data, then the video image is composed into the rendered scene of a virtual environment.