To tell or not to tell...Building an interactive virtual storyteller

Storytellers do not always tell the story the same way. They observe their "audience", see their reactions and adapt the way, the gestures, the posture and the content of the story, to better respond to the audience's reactions. Clearly, this adaptation is however not only in the content of the story but also on the way the story is told, thus the facial expressions and the gestures of the storyteller. In this paper we describe a synthetic character that tells stories interactively, discussing how the adaptation to the audience is done through the content of the story and the associated expressions and gestures of the character.