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Damian Hills is a multimedia developer with over 10 years industry experience. He has worked on a wide range of projects for industries including medicine, education, government, film, and games, in Australia, US and Europe. After completing a Graduate Diploma in Advanced Computing at UTS in 2006, Damian joined CCS as a PhD student in 2008 to research interactive narrative and storytelling systems and how they can be applied to conversational systems of a multimodal collaborative nature.

Drawing on such diverse fields such as narratology, cybernetics, and multimodal interaction, this research aims to investigate a model for how multimodal interface and conversational information systems can assist in the production of meaning and sense-making for collaborative storytelling applications. A key component is the development and evaluation of a storytelling system, assimilate.net. This project is a collaborative environment that allows participants to visually construct narratives in an abstract virtual space. The system consists of a visual search engine that semantically aligns the participant’s search criteria with template stories drawn from a database of mythology and folklore. By use of a novel interface, participants develop the notion of a constructed ‘closed world’ that forms coherence and collective sense-making, while glimpses of chaotic patterns may be seen outside.

This research is funded by Australasian Center for Interaction Design (ACID) as a part of the 'Our Content' project which aims to develop a reusable framework for generative content systems.