EM-Glue: A Platform for Decoupling Experience Managers and Environments

Abstract

Experience Management uses AI technologies to improve people's experiences within an interactive application by changing the environment while the experience is underway. Game-related research in this field has a trend where each experience manager is built in a way that is tightly integrated with the environment that it can change. One consequence of this integration is that it becomes difficult to compare one manager to another in a single environment, or a single manager to itself across multiple environments. With this paper, we propose a solution for decoupling experience managers from the environments that they can change, through the use of an intermediate software platform. We describe the structure of the platform, a protocol that facilitates communication between a manager and an environment, and how normal communication happens. Moreover, we introduce the Camelot Wrapper, software built to extend the interactive visualization engine Camelot and connect it to our platform.