Storycaster: An AI System for Immersive Room-Based Storytelling

Abstract: While Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) systems have long enabled room-scale virtual reality and various kinds of interactivity, their content has largely remained predetermined. We present \textit{Storycaster}, a generative AI CAVE system that transforms physical rooms into responsive storytelling environments. Unlike headset-based VR, \textit{Storycaster} preserves spatial awareness, using live camera feeds to augment the walls with cylindrical projections, allowing users to create worlds that blend with their physical surroundings. Additionally, our system enables object-level editing, where physical items in the room can be transformed to their virtual counterparts in a story. A narrator agent guides participants, enabling them to co-create stories that evolve in response to voice commands, with each scene enhanced by generated ambient audio, dialogue, and imagery. Participants in our study ($n=13$) found the system highly immersive and engaging, with narrator and audio most impactful, while also highlighting areas for improvement in latency and image resolution.