Editorial: Expressive Interactive Systems That Tell a Story

This special issue brings together selected, extended contributions from the Fourth Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN 2011), with a special focus on research concerning the application of new technologies in the field of arts and culture. Since 2005, the INTETAIN conferences provide an international forum for researchers in the field of interaction technologies, with a special focus on entertainment. The conference aims at enhancing the understanding of recent and anticipated advances in interactive technologies, and their applications to entertainment, education, culture, and the arts. The way users consume and interact with media and applications, both locally and over the internet, are continually changing. The explosion of natural, multimodal, and touch based interfaces, and their access to the general public, has made new interaction paradigms a reality. In this tradition, INTETAIN 2011, held in Genova, Italy, May 2011, included the presentation of research works on virtual/mixed/augmented reality, hardware technologies for interaction and entertainment, devices, animation and virtual characters, non-verbal full body interaction, storytelling, affective user interfaces, social interaction and children interaction.