Hi everyone,

I started considering the idea that a type of software similar to gaming could be "interactive movie software," where there is no "game" involved, but instead a story where a user might want to participate in writing the story, like in "Choose Your Own Adventure" books that I used to read when I was a kid.

My startup idea, which I believe I alone have the technological breakthroughs to pull of, is: A (secure) desktop application where users can choose a character, played by an actor, and manipulate the 3D actor in a movie as though it's a video game, but with different goals--you are "participating in a story" that you want to watch, not trying to defeat any bad guys or achieve any goals like definitely rescuing someone.

The program would just use the mouse keyboard, and would involved 3D graphics and not any kind of virtual reality; it would have a "3rd person" perspective. The only part I haven't figured how to do yet is how to devise "open-ended stories" that would be built by AI, acted out by animated actors with some dialog, either voiced by actors or printed as captions-text, and displayed to users for their input as they watch and influence the story. I also haven't decided if I should accept some sort of "partial story input" from users, e.g., scene templates of some sort. Deciding on how to construct scenes, including dialog and character movement, and perhaps redoing stories in accordance with measured user feedback, in terms of how much the users like a given story or certain parts of it, is something I haven't fully though through yet.

I might not ever do this startup idea, just like some of my other ideas that I've presented and could certainly do but might not want to invest the time and commitment resources into as full-blown business ideas or projects. At the same time, I decided to present the idea, partly to indicate it as a possibility, and partly to claim credit for having thought of the idea.

-Philip White (philipjwhite@yahoo.com)