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We present GENIE, a VR-based reading system that generates story-adaptive 360° panoramic environments from narrative text to deepen readers’ engagement with fictional stories. 

To this end, an AI pipeline segments book text into scene-level units and derives location-focused image prompts via large language models. With these prompts, corresponding panoramas are synthesized using diffusion-based image generation and neural super-resolution models. 

Texts and corresponding scenes are presented via a Unity VR application, that maps the 360° panoramas to a skybox and presents text on a non-diegetic panel. With narrative progression, the environment gets updated accordingly.

Code available at: https://github.com/Fieeesch/genie_immersivereading

(Cecilia Halbritter / Prof. Dr.-Ing. Weier, WS 25/26)