What more can I do with INSCAPE ?

With INSCAPE, several additional features are also available to assist you in the creation process through integrated plugins or external helper applications. These are dedicated tools providing advanced support, creation and edition of INSCAPE objects for use in multimedia stories.

Integrated Features

• Create 2D interactive characters - Character Object Editor
• Include sound and music in your stories - Sound System
• Use speech commands to control the story - Speech Interaction Editor
• Control the story flow - Story Pacing
• Quickly set the environment mood - Atmosphere Editor
• Use various input devices for experiencing stories - Multimodal Devices Controller

Features provided by external applications

• Create 2D drawings and animations - 2D Asset Editor
• Prepare 3D characters for animation - 3D Body Editor
• Perform MOCAP for 3D characters - Animation Builder
• Create 360°x180° panoramic images - Panorama Builder
• Turn photographs and panoramas into 3D models - Environment Builder
• Create advanced audio assets - Sound Editor
• Design multi-user physical interactive setups - Augmented Reality Experiences Editor
• Use geo-positioning criteria to control interactivity - Map-based Mobile Experience Editor

Integrated Features

The following tools are implemented as plugins and accessible directly within INSCAPE main application. All tasks accomplished with these plugins will therefore be integrated and saved with your story project.

Create 2D interactive characters - Character Object Editor

The Character Object Editor enables authors to create and modify the interactive part of a 2D INSCAPE Character. Starting from a suitable animated sequence (taken from a .mov file, a .pli file, or even a simple frame sequence) created with a 2D Asset Editor, authors can create a 2D interactive character.

Interactive characters are "black boxes" representing a character that is able to perform a set of actions. The interactivity of a 2D INSCAPE Character is represented by a state graph. This graph contains all the animations and the possible transitions among them.

Include sound and music in your stories - Sound System

The INSCAPE Sound System is a transparent plugin that provides support for playing audio files in most of the commonly used file formats and has a number of built-in signal processing effects (such as filtering, reverb, compression and equalization). More advanced features include mixer groups, adaptive mixing, and adaptive music. Sounds can be positioned in both 2D and 3D.

Single-file sounds can be imported directly into INSCAPE. For more advanced types of sound usage (such as adaptive music), a Sound Editor is included where multi-file sound assets can be put together.

Use speech commands to control the story - Speech Interaction Editor

The Speech Interaction Editor enables an author to define speech commands and provides in combination with the Automatic Speech Recognition Device the functionality for using those speech commands in INSCAPE stories. So, it is possible to control or modify in principle all kinds of INSCAPE objects in a story by speech, making interaction more natural.

Control the story flow - Story Pacing

The purpose of Story Pacing is to give the author control of the story flow during runtime especially in highly interactive stories. With the help of Story Pacing the author can define time constraints as well as create different ways to experience the same story (e.g. playful and interactive exploration of content for young people, mature presentation of the story for elderly people). For example, the story could be sped up for a younger audience by skipping irrelevant story pieces.

Quickly set the environment mood - Atmosphere Editor

Atmosphere Editor core function is to orchestrate other INSCAPE modules in order to improve affects in virtual scenes, changing 3D environment properties, lights and character behaviours. It can modify scene environment and lighting by simply setting sliders to various simple emotion states such as Oppressive / Cheerful and Bluesy / Spirit.

Use various input devices for experiencing stories - Multimodal Devices Controller

The MMDC (multimodal devices controller) is the layer supporting hardware devices that will bring interaction into the story. It consists in the MMDC plugin itself and one plugin for each kind of supported device: mouse, keyboard, joysticks, 3d trackers and other virtual reality devices.

The plugin relies on the two main components of the interaction theory: the devices and the interaction metaphors. The metaphor objects describe the way an input device user interacts with the story. If a planned device is not available at run-time, a fallback device can still be used.

Features provided by external applications

Several External tools called Advanced Creators are included with the INSCAPE package. They give you the possibility to create your own custom assets and later import them in your interactive stories. When you use these applications, you can work independently from your INSCAPE project as you are creating separate files such as images or sounds compatible with INSCAPE.

Create 2D drawings and animations - 2D Asset Editor

The 2D Asset Editor is a tool to build 2D assets for use in INSCAPE: levels of animation, backgrounds, and props. It is used to create the animation sequences that will be associated to an INSCAPE object (2D Character, 2D Prop, 2D Background and overlay).

You can draw animations in both vector-based and raster-based (colour mapped) using a proprietary format.

Prepare 3D characters for animation - 3D Body Editor

The 3D Body Editor provides the user with a tool to create and edit a weighted mesh usable by CS V-Man SDK, which is the Character Animation System used in INSCAPE for the 3D stories. Moreover, 3D Body Editor can be used to edit the position of the hotspots (the points of interaction) of the character.

Perform MOCAP for 3D characters - Animation Builder

Animation Builder is a 3D scene acquisition application designed to capture motion data to be applied to 3D story characters when the story needs more specific content than the one already present in the INSCAPE library. It provides a complete toolset for acquiring motion data from video footage and turning it into 3D standard motion capture (MOCAP).

Create 360°x180° panoramic images - Panorama Builder

The Panorama Builder module allows one to create a panoramic image by stitching together a number of overlapping pictures taken from the same viewpoint in various directions. The process is completely automatic, making it particularly easy even for the non-specialist user to create background images, or digital matte paintings, for 2D or 3D stories.

Turn photographs and panoramas into 3D models - Environment Builder

INSCAPE Environment Builder enables the construction of photo-real environments in 3D for virtual visits and exploration. Starting directly from digital photographs, or from full 360-degree panoramas, Environment Builder facilitates the creation of models and textures within a chosen scene to achieve highly realistic 3D environments. The results can be used as 3D backgrounds to build stories.

Create advanced audio assets - Sound Editor

The Sound Editor provides tools for viewing a Waveform, setting loop points, configuring sound assets, creating adaptive music banks, dialog collections, 3D mixing, effects and event trees.

Design multi-user physical interactive setups - Augmented Reality Experiences Editor

The Augmented Reality Experiences Editor (ARTECT) simplifies the process of authoring Augmented Reality (AR) interactive experiences and has a particular focus on supporting the museum sector. Interactive experiences constructed in ARTECT can integrate marker-based augmented reality interaction with playback of sound, display of HTML documents, control of lighting and tangible device input, allowing for the authoring of experiences that have the potential to engage multiple collocated users through physical interactions.

Use geo-positioning criteria to control interactivity - Map-based Mobile Experience Editor

The role of this editor is to allow authors to visualise geographic information (e.g., Maps) alongside visualisations of the underlying infrastructure of wireless communications and positioning systems in order to decide where to locate hotspots and other triggers that will enable users to access different digital assets as they enter specific locations. Such a tool could be used for authoring a variety of location-based stories such as tours, guides and games to be experienced on mobile devices.

Supported File Formats

Please see the Supported File Formats section to see what files you can use with INSCAPE.