The Microsoft Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) research project combines 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 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. The representation specifies the orchestration of multiple nonlinear “stories” that thread through multiple experiences. The representation is defined at a fundamentally higher level than presentation markup languages such as HTML and CSS. We have defined equivalent XML and JSON versions of this representation.
- A set of core libraries, called “RIN Core”, that interpret the above representation. These libraries are targeted to particular rendering platforms, the most notable one being HTML+JavaScript. An earlier version targeted the Silverlight platform. In theory, one could build multiple version of the RIN core libraries each specialized to certain platforms to take advantage of evolving technology or particular presentation constraints.
- Plugin libraries called Experience Providers, each of which brings a specific visualization experience (such as maps, panoramas, paginated documents and various forms of data visualization) into the realm of RINs.
- Authoring tools to create RIN content. Authoring RIN content is decoupled from rendering content, much as authoring of HTML content is decoupled from rendering content. In fact authoring RIN content is an open-ended affair.
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Example narratives
Learn more
- Sri Andal Temple Digital Heritage Interactive Walkthrough Demo
- Internet Explorer Reaches New Heights on the Web with Everest: Rivers of Ice
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Advisors
P. Anandan, Gordon Bell, Steve Drucker, Rick Szeliski, Curtis Wong
Technology
Core Platform and Data Model
Naren Datha, Joseph Joy, Eric Stollnitz
Interaction Design and Visual Layout
Kanchen Rajanna, Jatin Shah, Sujit Warrier
Player UX and Experience Providers
Nikhil Arjunagi, Joybroto Banerjee, Pushkar Chitnis, Naren Datha, Aldo John, Tanuja Joshi, Joseph Joy, Vinay Krishnaswami, Aditya Sankar, Eric Stollnitz, Anand Tekaday
Authoring Tools
Joybroto Banerjee, Naren Datha, Tanuja Joshi, Saurabh Kothari, Chinmay Kulkarni, Ajay Manchepalli, Gautham Mudambi, Poornima Rajagopal, Gopal Srinivasa, Sujit Warrier
Media Collections and Hosting Infrastructure
Robert Eberl, Joseph Joy, Gopal Srinivasa, Anand Tekaday
Program Management
Nikhil Chandran, Ajay Manchepalli, Sujit Warrier
Content
Kapil Chandran, Nikhil Chandran, Naren Datha, Rikin Gandhi, Mohit Gupta, Joseph Joy, Prasad Naldurg, Niti Madhugiri, Ajay Manchepalli, Archana Prasad, Ria Rajan, Kanchen Rajanna, Tim Robinson, Lisa Sertec, Prashant Sharma, Beatriz Stollnitz, Eric Stollnitz, Sridhar Vedantham
People
Ajay Manchepalli
Principal Research Program Manager
Gopal Srinivasa
Principal RSDE
Sridhar Vedantham
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