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Wolves in the Walls’ Lucy Steps Beyond VR Into Sundance Film Festival
Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean’s Wolves in the Walls and its star character Lucy might have been brought into virtual reality (VR) by Fable Studio but the team has far greater plans for its Virtual Being. This was showcased during the Sundance Film Festival this past week with Lucy attending the event to get feedback for her very own short film.
The very first Virtual Being to attend the festival, Lucy held meet and greets with other Sundance artists to discuss ideas for her film Dracula (working title) with the Fable team then taking those to create the very first screening which took place on Tuesday 2nd.
“As an aspiring artist and a work of art, she relates to festival-goers on multiple levels,” said Halley Lamberson, Producer, Lucy, in a statement. “The meta creative process for our team, trying to capture the behind the scenes of creation, the layers of creativity between character, team and movie…Nostalgic style yet simultaneously a paradoxical mix of old tech and new tech.”
The purpose was to further push Fable’s AI vision for virtual beings, where they can become more than just pre-programmed characters. The idea is to create interactive characters, whether that’s for VR or any other media, which can learn and remember their interactions with you for a far more engaging experience. This was put to the test by Lucy responding to the audience via video chat.
In the video below you can view the short film and see how Lucy responded to questions about the film, being at the festival and more. It provides a tantalising glimpse at the future of AI storytelling.
“Sundance is about community building, risk taking and the new and crazy in storytelling. So putting Lucy in the midst of a community and have her learn about community building – and this community especially as she’s an aspiring animator made perfect sense for us,” adds director Philipp Maas.
Lucy’s first film may not be ready for the bigscreen just yet so in the meantime there’s always Wolves in the Walls for Oculus Quest and Rift. As Fable Studio continues its work in AI, VRFocus will keep you updated.
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You Can Chat Now With Lucy From Wolves In The Walls
Wolves In The Walls is out now on Oculus Quest and if you’re looking for a personal and meaningful interaction with a virtual character, we definitely recommend meeting 8-year-old Lucy.
The $9 experience is a told as a roughly 40 minute interactive story based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. We don’t want to spoil it for folks who haven’t seen it yet but people have found themselves deeply impacted by Lucy and her story. According to Fable Studio, when they released an earlier version of the Wolves In The Walls on Oculus Rift they created a website styled like an old bulletin board system which invited people to write letters to Lucy. They say they’ve received thousands of letters to her “and it showed that people wanted to continue to interact,” Fable co-founder Edward Saatchi wrote in an email.
Now that so many people are experiencing Wolves in the Walls on Oculus Quest, the studio says it is releasing a “limited” number of tickets to “sign up for video calls from Lucy.” They’ve got some details in a blog post explaining some of the technology behind the scenes powering Lucy, including GPT-3, procedural animation, synthetic speech and speech to text. Fable’s technology is even meant to include a kind of “AI memory so that the virtual being can remember and grow with you.”
The studio is also working on a follow-up experience dubbed Whispers in the Night, also featuring conversations with Lucy.
Here’s an example conversation Fable shared showing the technology in action:
Fable – AI Generated Scene 1 from Fable on Vimeo.
We haven’t had a chance yet to have a full-fledged conversation with Lucy just yet. The page to sign up for a chance to talk to Lucy is https://fable-studio.com/signup. If you try it out let us know in the comments how it worked out for you. According to Fable, they also plan to have Lucy send replies to folks who have submitted letters to her. The feature inviting people to write letters is coming to the Quest version of the experience as well.
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The Evolution Of Virtual Beings As Both AI And Art
The Virtual Beings Summit posits that artificial intelligence is the next great art form. It explores how AI and entertainment will give birth to virtual beings, avatars, agents, assistants, and virtual influencers.
The first Virtual Beings Summit took place in July in San Francisco, and it had a decidedly technology-oriented focus, said Edward Saatchi, co-creator of the conference and CEO of Fable Studios (developers of Wolves in the Walls), in an interview with VentureBeat. The Los Angeles version of the summit took place on November 19 at the United Talent Agency in Beverly Hills, California, and this event is more about entertainment, Saatchi told me. The summit also named the winners of its first Virtual Beings grants, which are listed below.
It’s all about taking virtual characters, infusing them with AI, and bringing them to life. Saatchi believes that artists, engineers, and AI experts working together will make this happen. The first conference, which I attended, showed a lot of examples of this, and the idea stayed with me in interviews such as the one I did about AI and game development with Richard Bartle.
There are many ways this could evolve. But virtual beings might one day be part of our family, our friends, our mentors, and our supporters, according to the summit.
Putting The ‘Art’ in ‘Artificial’
The summit’s goal is to unite the separate communities of artists and technologists. This conference will include a session on the ethics of AI, and how to use it correctly.
“The previous summit was more technical, and I hope this one will focus more on actual outcomes that would work for consumers,” Saatchi said. “It’s a bit more real world because this isn’t AR/VR. It’s focused on devices and hardware people use today.”
Travis Cloyd, founder of Worldwide XR, will speak at the summit about his company’s attempt to bring James Dean back to life as a virtual actor.
The speakers include Doug Roble of Digital Domain, Geoff McFetridge (interface designer for Her), Chris Bregler (Google AI), and Emma Coats (handling personality for Google Assistant), discussing topics across digital humans, virtual friends, virtual influencers, conversational AI, machine learning, and more. UTA Ventures head of ventures Sam Wick will be hosting an investor panel with VCs David Min, Jon Goldman, Clinton Foy, and Will Thompson.
Dave Schlafman, a five-time Emmy-nominated producer, will also give a talk, as well as director Jessica Brillhart of the Mixed Reality Lab and Michael Koperwas, mixed reality supervisor at ILMxLAB.
Saatchi’s own effort to create a virtual being — the character Lucy from Fable’s VR experience Wolves in the Walls — won an Emmy award. He defines a virtual being as a character that you know isn’t real but with whom you can build a two-way emotional relationship. Mica from Magic Leap is another example. These virtual beings can reach across platforms, including social media, augmented reality headsets, virtual reality, chat devices like Alexa, smartphones, and more.
“We’ve got good Hollywood people around the concept of digital actors,” Saatchi said. “We want to look at how it changes acting, how it changes rock stars, how it changes celebrities and influencers. Hopefully it will inspire Hollywood a lot about all of the different opportunities.”
One company, Hereafter, is introducing virtual immortality, bringing dead relatives back to life so they can talk to you in their own voices through Alexa. Some creators want to bring virtual influencers like Lil Miquela to the movies, concerts, fashion shows, and more.
“We take a look at the risks around deepfakes and how they can say things that a person didn’t say,” Saatchi said.
Winners of the first Virtual Being Developer Grants
The winners of the first Virtual Beings grants — out of nearly 100 applications — include a recreation of Indian national hero Mahatma Gandhi and virtual city guides. “It was impossible to choose just 6, so the entrants this time will be re-entered for the next batch of grants winners to be announced in April,” Saatchi promised.
Coala Guides to explore the real world
The goal of this project was to create virtual beings that help us explore and interact with the world around us. The beings will make it easy for people to see their surroundings with fresh eyes.
Eliza has questions for you
Eliza is a voice assistant specializing in romance; an expert on cohabitation, all-devouring passions, and penchants of all kinds; and a virtuoso of desire and attachment. That is how Eliza introduces herself as she enters your world, which she then disrupts with her many questions.
Eat pancakes with a virtual being
This is an interactive installation that invites visitors to dine with a conversational AI. Over a familiar breakfast in a casual setting, the experience explores how virtual beings can begin to augment human connection, highlighting a near future where they fill gaps in our lives.
Virtual immortality through a legacy bot
Currently, people sometimes save voicemail messages from loved ones who have passed away just so they can again hear their voices. Meanwhile, people use voice platforms like Alexa and Assistant mostly for trivialities like setting timers, dimming lights, and playing music. The HereAfter service unites those activities, bringing back people who have died by making their voices live on. The creators say they are far from being able to engineer AIs that converse as well as people do. But using currently available methodologies for dialogue systems and voice computing, the creators have the ability to offer a memory-sharing service that vastly outperforms what people have access to today.
Preserving the voice of a poet with Parkinson’s
The poet Hal Sirowitz was one of the most popular poets in the United States in the 1990s, a regular on MTV and one of the original performers at the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe. He has been living with Parkinson’s disease for over 22 years, but continues to be productive and creative. Sirowitz and his partner — the writer Minter Krotzer — have become advocates for people and families struggling with Parkinson’s disease. This project incorporates Hal’s poems into an HTML web voice reactive interface. People with Parkinson’s disease who spend 30 minutes a day reciting his poems with the interactive AI tool have seen improvement with their vocalization and speech. They’re turning Hal the poet into a virtual character.
Mahatma Gandhi as a virtual being
This group is working on innovative pedagogies in the education space to bring back historic characters like scientists, freedom fighters, and activists from whom students can learn about history in an interactive way. To start with, the group is working on a digital Mahatma Gandhi to explain his teachings on ahimsa (nonviolence), satyagraha (passive resistance), kindness, critical inquiry, and education.
This article by Dean Takahashi originally appeared on VentureBeat.
The post The Evolution Of Virtual Beings As Both AI And Art appeared first on UploadVR.
Virtual Beings Summit Returns, First Grant Winners Revealed
In the summer the first Virtual Beings Summit was held in San Francisco, bringing together innovators in this space as the experimentation into virtual beings continues to grow. Today, sees the arrival of the second summit, this time held at the United Talent Agency (UTA) Theater in Beverly Hills alongside revealing the first Virtual Beings Grants winners.
The summit aims to bring leaders in the field of entertainment and artificial intelligence to discuss virtual beings, avatars, agents, assistants, and influencers. If you’re not sure what a virtual being is they’re described as: “A character that you know isn’t real but with whom you can build a Two-way emotional relationship.” You’ve probably already come across one in your everyday life, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Lil Miquela on Instagram or even the recent news that James Dean is being brought back to life as a virtual actor. When it comes to virtual reality (VR) the best example currently is Fable’s Wolves in the Walls featuring central character Lucy, with the final chapter arriving this month.
Experts talking at the Virtual Beings Summit will include Doug Roble (Digital Domain), Geoff McFetridge (artist), Chris Bregler (Google AI), and Emma Coats (Editorial Lead in Personality for Google Assistant), discussing topics across Digital Humans, Virtual Friends, Virtual Influencers, Conversational AI, Machine Learning and more. UTA’s Head of Ventures Sam Wick will also be hosting an Investor Panel featuring David Min, Jon Goldman, Clinton Foy, and Will Thompson.
As for the Virtual Beings Grant winners three have been chosen, Joylab, Rattapallax and Thoughtfish. It hasn’t been revealed how much each project received but the grants range from $1,000 to $25,000 USD depending on the idea.
The key aspect for employing a virtual being within a VR experience is the ability to evoke a stronger emotional connection, therefore increasing that sense of presence and immersion a player feels. Using machine learning these virtual beings can then remember conversations and interactions, offering a unique experience for each person.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of the summit and virtual beings in general, reporting back as their implementation grows and becomes more advanced.