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This paper describes recent progress toward a framework and toolset for Very Distributed Storytelling. It focuses on three independent but interconnected axes of development: continuous story playout environments, story authoring systems, and scenarios for interaction, particularly those that operate in casual or formal architectural spaces. Aspects of these are explored in several systems currently under development at the Interactive Cinema Group of the MIT Media Laboratory. Agent Stories invites authors to develop story segments that know about their role in the story and agents that can use these role designations to orchestrate the playout of story parts. Happenstance, an ecologically based, context-sensitive "stage" for the performance of interactive narratives, provides an information landscape that is continuous in space and time, supports multiple viewpoints, and acts as a semi-porous membrane to information and messages from the outside world. The CINEMAT and other large-scale interactive media pieces--situated in sensor-rich architectural spaces--explore the relationships among immersion, interaction, narrative guidance, and public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In hyperlinked video, objects are selectable-resulting in an associated action--akin to linked words or graphics on Web pages. Possible venues for hyperlinked video include broadcast television, streaming video (e.g., video on the Internet or other forms of video-on-demand systems), and published media such as DVD (digital versatile disc). Hyperlinked video offers new interaction possibilities with streaming media and the opportunity to move electronic commerce from the personal computer to the television receiver while making it more dynamic and engaging. In this paper we examine some opportunities and challenges of hyperlinked video, describe an object tracking and identification algorithm and an authoring tool we have developed, and discuss two prototype hyperlinked television programs--one an augmented broadcast and one a video-on-demand application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]