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.
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.”
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.
Another excellent VR movie is on its way to Oculus Quest. This time it’s Fable Studio’s Wolves in the Walls.
The experience, which arrived on Oculus Rift last year, was recently listed in the Coming Soon section of the Oculus Quest store. It’s the same situation as the surprise listing for Spheres earlier this week; we don’t know exactly when the piece will be landing but fingers crossed it’s sometime this year. No price has been announced, either. Check out the trailer below.
Wolves In The Walls Oculus Quest Release Confirmed
Wolves in the Walls is one of our favorite VR experiences from 2019. The piece follows Lucy, an eight-year-old girl that starts hearing noises in her home. Interacting directly with the viewer, Lucy tries to warn her family of the threat across a roughly 40-minute story.
The piece was written and directed by Pete Billington and based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Last year it won an Emmy for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media. Fable Studio itself is comprised of former members of Oculus Story Studio, the VR team behind Dear Angelica and Henry that Facebook shut down a few years back.
We really loved Wolves in the Walls as it released episodically last year. It’s great in general to see some of VR’s best movies coming to Quest, which has primarily been centered as a gaming device thus far.
Will you be checking out Wolves in the Walls on Oculus Quest? Let us know in the comments below!
Every year is the biggest year for virtual reality. It seems more developers are delving into VR to explore the medium, hone their techniques and find out what works and what doesn’t. Virtual reality fans walk a similar path; every achievement in this burgeoning medium sets a new bar, and a new expectation of something greater as a result.
Now, a little under four years since the big names in hardware released their first generation consumer headsets, we live in a time when a number of VR games have actually approached the best that any gaming platform has to offer. And although this next decade is slated to include big titles from established studios, next-gen hardware built by the biggest in manufacturing, and experiences that teeter on complete photorealism, it’s these formative steps that are defining what’s fun, meaningful, and technically possible.
In our third annual Game of the Year Awards, we again celebrate those VR games—those stories that can only be told through the act of suspending your disbelief and immersing yourself in another world, head-first.
Without further ado, Road to VR’s 2019 Game of the Year Award winners:
Sanzaru Games and Oculus Studios brought Asgard’s Wrath to life as a part of the Oculus initiative to fund less, but bigger titles for the Rift platform. And outside of some PC-to-VR ports, it doesn’t get bigger than this melee-focused action RPG, which puts you squarely in a world that’s surprisingly alive, and boasts a depth in gameplay and visuals that make it truly something to behold. There’s little filler in the 30+ hour adventure, but even if you go for the meatiest bits, you’re looking at very least a hearty helping of gameplay that should last you well into the double digits.
While this Norse-inspired adventure doesn’t occupy an open world, it feels impressively large in scope as you traverse the game’s many layers, including moments when you need to either be god-sized or mortal-sized to solve puzzles and engage in epic combat, and when you have to control your chimeric animal pals to act as both keys to specific puzzles or order around as essential combat partners.
The game’s gestural-based combat takes some time to massage into muscle memory, but once you get down the basic moves of parrying, blocking, and countering, the game really starts to take flight. And when you begin matching those moves with more difficult enemies, many of which have their own combat styles, you’ll quickly learn that Asgard’s Wrath demands nothing short of precision (i.e. no wildly waggling your controller).
How much you like the puzzles or combat is basically subjective, but one thing that’s positively undeniable is the game’s visual finesse. Although object interaction wasn’t notable, Sanzaru expertly showcases its attention to detail as one of the key pillars of immersion. Textures, character animations, level design, all of these things are impressively realized, making it one of those games that begs for your attention long after you complete its twisty-turny story.
Wary of other rhythm games in the wake of Beat Saber (2018) hype? You shouldn’t be, as Cloudhead Games thrusts into the genre with its addictive and mightily impressive title Pistol Whip.
Pistol Whip successfully marries rhythm and shooting, and gets mega style points in the process, as it draws on things like the John Wick film series and Equilibrium (2002) for inspiration. You might also describe it as a fun mashup between Superhot VR (2017), Beat Saber, and Smash Hit (2015).
Like any good arcade game, cognitive load is high in Pistol Whip. You’re tasked with returning fire and dodging incoming bullets from scores of enemies—approaching the sort of flow state you achieve in a bullet hell game, except you’re using your whole upper body to physically flow to the beat. Its bass-heavy music goes particularly well with the punchy tones of your gunshots.
The more you fire on-beat, the more points you get, forcing you to not only shoot accurately, but to feel the music and really immerse yourself in the cool, stylized world. The song library is still a little on the low side, but it doesn’t stop the game’s replayability from being both extremely high and ultimately super satisfying.
PlayStation London Studio heard loud and clear from players of PlayStation VR Worlds (2016), the studio’s PSVR launch title, that VR needed more of the narrative-driven action teased by the ‘London Heist’ mini-game. And in Blood & Truth, the studio delivered, full stop.
Blood & Truth is the fully fleshed out vision that ‘London Heist’ deserved. Set in the midst of two warring crime families, the game takes players on an action-packed journey with strong gun and shooting mechanics, richly detailed environments, and action set pieces made to make you feel like you’re the star of your own action movie. With a smart approach to locomotion (which lets players focus on the fun) and thoughtful details (like the ability to twirl pistols around your finger for extra flair) the game manages to hit a consistently satisfying note throughout.
We also really enjoyed the scene where the player sneaks into a modern art museum, which London Studio used as a genius way to pepper the game with some rather unique VR moments that otherwise would have lacked context.
Blood & Truth is an impressively crafted experience that is not only expertly designed around the limitations of the aging PSVR, but even manages to raise the technical bar for character rendering and performances on any VR platform even against much more powerful PC hardware.
Note: VR games which were available on other VR platforms in previous years were not considered for our Quest Game of the Year award.
From the earliest days of VR you can people talking about how cool it would be to wield a lightsaber. And as VR matured over the years that talk slowly moved toward wanting a full-blown VR game in the Star War universe. There were teases… oh there were teases. ILMxLab itself put out the 10 minute Trials on Tatooine back in 2016, but it only made one thing clear: this wasn’t enough.
That project, along with other pioneering VR work by ILMxLab, like Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire at The VOID, finally culminated in Star Wars: Vader Immortal – Episode I, the first of a three-part narrative adventure on Oculus Quest.
Not only is Vader Immortal – Episode I (and the two following episodes) likely the most successful fusion to date of consumer VR and one of the worlds biggest media franchises, it’s also a stunning proof that you don’t need high-end computing power for an engaging and immersive experience.
For players taking their first steps into VR with Quest, Vader Immortal – Episode I is an ideal opening act that strikes a great balance between narrative and gameplay. Though this singular episode doesn’t run very long, it takes players on a thoughtfully crafted journey that sells the feeling of actually being part of the Star Wars story.
And for the more hardcore gamers that can’t quite get enough Vader Immortal – Episode I‘s ‘lightsaber dojo’ offers up wave-based combat which is challenging and engaging enough to easily triple the time spend in the campaign portion of the game. And as the first part of a trilogy, Episode II & Episode III are already available for players to continue the story.
Five Nights at Freddy’s took the Internet by storm back in 2014 with its memorable jump scares and bizarre re-imagining of the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant/arcade attraction. Now, Steel Wool Studios has rebuilt the game from the ground-up as a Freddy Fazbear-brand VR experience, which includes a number of minigames in addition to the good ol’ classic task of evading the deadly animatronics from your curiously unsafe control room.
Object interaction is well designed in Five Nights at Freddy’s VR, which helps ground you in the world, and it’s really well polished on the graphical side as well. One big part of what makes FNAF VR great though is sound design, as you’re forced to not only look at the CRT monitors to see where each of the monstrous creations could be lurking, but you also have to listen for them clanking around. Ambient noises such as spinning fans and flickering lights really crank up the fear factor as you frantically pick apart what’s an important sound and what’s simply background filler. The lack of sound is even worse, as any FNAF fan can attest to.
Taking a big screaming Freddy to your face when you eventually fail to correctly manage resources is about 100 times scarier in VR; you simply can’t look away. You’d be forgiven if you’d rather watch someone else play from the comfort of your couch and a security blanket than actually dive in head-first based on how immersive and scary Five Nights at Freddy’s VR truly is.
Stormland, like most great VR games, is very much designed around its locomotion. While all too many VR games have players slowly (and boorishly) walking from A to B, Stormland makes moving around part of the game’s core fun.
This is achieved first with an expansive world. The game is set in a world where floating islands jet out of a sea of clouds. The disparate islands are a marvel to look at as the sun strikes them just right, and knowing that they are real places that you can actually travel to makes them that much more alluring.
Second, Stormland makes its movement between important gameplay spaces fun by making it interesting and different from the typical locomotion. When you set foot onto the cloud sea, you immediately kick into speedy slipstream which has you jetting around at high speeds. While we’d normally expect this kind of quick movement in VR could make players dizzy, developer Insomniac Games realized that trying fast locomotion to broad body movements goes a long way to helping players remain comfortable. And so when you slipstream along the clouds, you keep your arms pointed outward in a superman pose and steer based on the direction they face.
Third, Stormland mixes and mashes locomotion schemes to give players freedom. Slipstreaming gets you from island to island quickly, but what do you do when you get there and find that the precipice is hundreds of feet overhead? Nearly everything in the game can be climbed with a laser that projects to nearby objects from the palm of your hands, and you can even grab a wall and ‘fling’ yourself for some extremely quick cliff scaling. And once you’re up there, you can glide naturally through the air to land on unsuspecting opponents or even cruise toward your next island destination.
With these gesture-driven locomotion schemes working together effectively, Stormland gives players a thrilling freedom of movement that’s unsurpassed in other titles. We hope (and expect) to see future VR titles borrow heavily from the foundation of excellent locomotion that Insomniac built into the game.
Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR), PlayStation (PSVR)
Release Date: August 14th, 2019 (VR mode)
PC-to-VR ports aren’t “perfect” for a number of reasons. It can come down to the limitations of aging game engines, a misunderstanding of what makes VR great, or the basic lack of time investment to fully realize a true VR version. Here, No Many’s Sky bucks the trend by presenting a fun and fully-playable VR mode, which thankfully came to all users this summer for free as a part of the base game on PC or PlayStation 4.
The VR mode is basically exactly what you’d imagine from No Man’s Sky in VR;blasting off into space is magical, exploring planets is awe inspiring, riding around in exovehicles is really awesome. It also looks great too, as the rich and vibrant universe demands even more inspection from the immersive viewpoint of a VR headset. That’s not to say we didn’t have our gripes with No Man’s Sky’s VR mode, as it largely ports over the same 2D inventory scheme as in the flatscreen version, and suffers from some clunk around the edges, the latter of which seems to have gotten better over the course of the last few updates.
But what really attracts us to No Man’s Sky is the utter vastness of the universe. The game is rife with opportunities to become a pirate, trader, fighter, bounty hunter, farmer—so much so that every quality-of-life update seems to tip the balance in favor of staying in the VR headset as opposed to just firing the game up on a flatscreen—the true mark of a great VR adaptation.
Available On: Oculus (Rift), Steam (Index, Vive, Rift)
Release Date: August 27th, 2019 (Early Access)
Until You Fall might seem like an odd choice for an Excellence in UI accolade, but the game succeeds here by knowing what to avoid in the game as much as what to add to it.
This rogue-lite melee combat game does a lot well, but in the interface department it makes several especially smart choices. For one, Schell Games was smart enough to realize that—in a game where players would not be using weapons other than their own—the ability to drop your weapons would merely add useless clunk to the game. Instead, weapons are summoned into players hands whenever they squeeze the grip buttons. This not only serves as a supremely efficient version of a ‘holster’, but it also feels really bad-ass to manifest your blades in the palm of your hand just before diving head first into a fight.
What’s more, when players aren’t holding their weapons, their hands become useful for other critical game tasks. Turning your palm upright reveals a menu of stats which speaks specifically to the weapon assigned to that hand. The menu floats above your hand, making it easy to optimally position, and disappears when you don’t need it any longer.
The game has also pioneered a very satisfying ‘crushing’ interaction which serves as a very engaging way to make important choices and selections. At the end of each room you get to pick between three different power-ups. When you decide which one you want, you reach out and grab it and continue to squeeze your grab trigger until you crush the power-up and consume its energy. With the addition of haptics and sound effects, it feels great every time, so it’s no wonder that we also see this same interaction used back in the forge for selecting and upgrading weapons.
And then there’s the game’s block and attack indicators. When enemies are attacking you you’ll see blue 2D block indicators appear showing you where to place your sword to block the attack. Although these can look and feel ‘arcadey’, their function outweighs any visual concerns; knowing when to block and where is part of the way that Until You Fall manages to set a deliberate and satisfying combat pace. Equally ‘arcadey’ but important and satisfying are the attack indicators. Once you break through the opponents shield you’ll get the opportunity to start a combo. In a combo you can dish out tremendous damage, but only if you strike along the indicated line in quick succession. Here too, great haptic and audio feedback make this feel awesome and satisfying.
Boneworks is a prime example of how independent developers who have the freedom to take risks can make huge contributions to their field. With two VR titles previously already under their belt, Stress Level Zero set out to make a no-compromise physically simulated VR experience.
By making nearly everything in the game physical and interactive, Boneworks delivers on player’s expectations of agency in a way that often goes far beyond its contemporaries. In the game, just about every object, enemy, and weapon is physically interactive, leading to moments where novel ideas—like, say, using a coffee mug as a melee weapon—actually work.
While the heavy emphasis on physics can be frustrating and wonky at times, it’s hard not to feel a sense of added embodiment when your ideas about what’s possible in the game world are satisfied in a realistic fashion. Things as simple as being able to push enemies away from you with the barrel of your gun—or as morbid as stabbing through multiple enemies simultaneously with a claymore—show a glimpse of the rich interactivity that is the ultimate goal of VR.
For its part, Boneworks is a flag in the ground which represents perhaps the most interactive physics sandbox seen in VR to date, and a proof point that glimpses the immersive benefits which come from more realistic virtual interactions.
Wolves in the Walls started out in life as an Oculus Story Studios project, although Facebook shuttered its first-party VR studio before the experience could be finished. It would have been a real shame if this highly immersive and well-realized retelling of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s eponymous children’s book wasn’t completed as a result. Thankfully, some ex-Story Studio veterans created Fable Studio and picked up the mantle to finish what Oculus had started.
Releasing its final chapter in November, the end result culminated in an intriguing and engaging story that centers around eight year-old Lucy, whose wild imagination has her convinced that wolves live in the walls of her home.
One of the biggest takeaways from Wolves in the Walls was how much digital humans can provide a sort of emotional immersion that will no doubt play a fundamental role in the VR games and stories of tomorrow. As cartoony as she was, it feels like Fable Studio really made it impossible to disappoint little Lucy. You’re her only friend and ally, and it’s too cold-hearted a prospect to break that trust, even just to see what happens if you don’t pay attention to her when she reaches out for assurance. In so doing, Wolves in the Walls shows off Pixar-level character design, which comes part and parcel with a rich color palette, cohesive set design, and a depth of animation expertise—all of which makes you genuinely feel like you’ve jumped into the pages of the book.
Fable Studio based their VR experience on a solid source material, but drawing you into that story would have been fruitless if you couldn’t connect with Lucy on some level. Here, she’s a real enough person to make you care about where the story ultimately goes, leaving you with a solid moment of self-reflection on your own ‘wolves in the walls’ once the credits roll.
Note: Games eligible for Road to VR‘s Game of the Year Award must be available to the public on or before December 13th, 2019 to allow for ample deliberation. Games must also natively support the target platform as to ensure full operability.
The road toUploadVR’s Best of 2019 awards starts here! Every weekday for the next fortnight, we’ll be revealing one of the ten nominees for our Overall VR Game/Experience of the Year, counting down to the reveal of our full list of categories and nominees later in December. Today we’re looking at how effortlessly Wolves in the Walls transforms Lucy into a believable, alive character worth spending time with.
When playing a non-VR video game I and probably most gamers around the world have subtly and gradually learned the language of game design. Intuitively we can figure out where to go, what to do, and who to talk to based on how things are laid out, color cues, sound clues, and more. And above all of that, we’re experts at suspending disbelief to get sucked into a fictional, digital world.
But VR changes all of that. The same tricks don’t work anymore and the same quality of NPC voice acting, animation, and scripting just isn’t good enough. In order to truly be immersed, it takes much more elegant AI to sell the illusion of a VR experience. This is something that Wolves in the Walls figures out immediately.
Fable Studio’s VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s classic children’s book begins with the main non-playable character, Lucy, literally drawing you into existence. You’re part imaginary friend, part tourist in her cartoon world where no one believes her that wolves are lurking in the walls. So she brought you here as witness.
You immediately have agency and purpose and Lucy treats you like an equal. She’ll walk around you, make eye contact while speaking, react to moves you make, and even remember things you do. Despite her bold colors, large eyes, and animated whimsy she is still the most believable virtual being I’ve ever seen in a piece of interactive media.
Wolves in the Walls is relatively short, you can see the entire three-part series in less than an hour probably, but it’s highly engaging. The latte portions do some amazing things by playing with your perspective, tricking your mind, and altering what seems real and what doesn’t. It’s a mind-bending story that’s told in a way that only VR can afford and it manages to deliver one of the most memorable things we’ve seen in a headset this year.
Wolves in the Walls is a free, interactive VR experience available exclusively on the Oculus Home for Rift store. We haven’t tried it with Oculus Quest via Link or over ReVive, but we expect it to work fine.
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.”
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.
You might have had a chance to try the first two chapters of Wolves in the Walls when it came to Rift last year, which left users of the interactive VR experience on a pretty intense cliffhanger to say the least. Today, Fable Studio, a team made up of veterans from Oculus’ now defunct Story Studio, released the third and final chapter of the story. And it’s nothing short of masterful.
“Masterful” isn’t a word I use lightly.
I had a chance to experience all the way up to the second chapter last year, and was already impressed with what I’d seen then. But the ending answers some pretty big questions, and it does it in a not-so-on-the-nose way that you’re still allowed to come to your own conclusions and inevitably think about your own ‘wolves in the walls’.
While I won’t spoil the experience for you (especially not the ending), the first two acts give you a sense of the emotional metaphors at hand. The wolves are real insofar they terrorize our protagonist, the wide-eyed, eight-year-old Lucy, and leave her truly frustrated, alienated, and incapable of thinking about anything else but the beasts causing mischief in her home.
It’s not until I sunk my teeth into the third act that it really comes together, and the wolves become three-dimensional creatures, both literally and figuratively speaking.
Image courtesy Fable Studio
One of the biggest takeaways was my absolute inability to not disappoint Lucy, as she asks you whether you believe her, or if you’re really a sincere friend. I like to break games, if only to see how they react, but this is one I couldn’t bring myself to contort. I couldn’t hurt Lucy, and it’s because she, in some sense, is as close to a real person as I’ve ever seen in virtual reality. Not in a purely visual sense, but in the confines of the world, she wasn’t a thin mannequin. She is a person, or at least enough of a person to get those millennia-old parts of my non-rational brain firing.
Outside of her Pixar-esque character design and infectious personality, I would say she’s also a pretty big achievement in VR immersion; if only all VR games and experiences had her ‘closeness’ of character—close in the sense that some part of you feels they exist, even when you accidentally clip through their bulbous head and see the back of their eyes by mistake.
Image courtesy Fable Studio
Not to delve into my own pseudo-understanding of philosophy, but Wolves in the Walls seems like a great starting point for an open-ended discussion on how our sense of reality is shaped by our individual perceptions, and how spaces and situations can be perceived differently in our minds depending on emotional context.
In a way, broaching the very subject as I sit in a quiet room on my own (prepared to write a hands-on article no less), I feel a little more at ease with my ‘wolves’, and also strangely a bit more fulfilled too. Granted, you may draw more or less the same conclusions by reading the original children’s book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, but for a 30-something guy with no kids (and consequently no interest in owning or buying children’s books), Wolves in the Walls easily fits into one of the best VR experiences I’ve had to date. Wading past the artifice that’s inherent in the current generation of VR devices, there’s definitely a kernel of something here that I won’t soon forget.
You can download all three chapters of Wolves in the Walls for free on the Rift platform here.
Today sees the launch of Fable’s third Wolves in the Walls chapter, titled They’re Everywhere. While using the medium of virtual reality (VR) the studio describes itself more as a ‘Virtual Beings’ company because of the main protagonist in the series, Lucy, who is more than just a character from a book.
In the previous two chapters, Wolves in the Walls: We Need Proof and Wolves in the Walls: It’s All OverLucy has been learning and forming memories of her interactions with the audience, adapting and weaving those into the final story resolution.
Lucy has a vivid imagination and as the viewer, you’re her imaginary friend. But Lucy’s imagination proves to be a reality, and you need to help her discover what’s hiding inside the walls of her house. Based on the 2003 children’s book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, this final chapter expands upon the mystery and you’ll connect with Lucy’s Nana.
“Having lost their house and all of their possessions, they finally come to terms with the fact that Nana is gone. It was the memories of all the things they did together that made their house a home, and something worth fighting for,” explains co-creator Pete Billington. “Lucy is the first one to realize this. Her beloved Pig Puppet is the talisman gift that Nana gave her, charged with all of that mnemonic energy. She must rescue Pig Puppet, the same way we run out of a burning house saving our photo album of irreplaceable memories.”
“We constantly ride the line between what is real and what is imagination. As Lucy’s imaginary friend, we see the world through her eyes, her mind and her thoughts. We are an extension of her. When she starts to doubt herself — wondering if the wolves are just her “imagination”, if it’s all “in her head”, our abilities as an imaginary friend start to come into question as well. In that moment, we start to see the world in fragments… through Lucy’s drawings. This sequence, when the wolves finally come out of the walls, was designed by Carlos Felipe Leon,” adds co-creator Jessica Shamash.
At the end of the experience, you can decide to continue being Lucy’s friend, offering an opportunity to create new memories together.
Wolves in the Walls Chapter 3: They’re Everywhere is available now on the Oculus Store for Oculus Rift. For further updates on Fable’s virtual beings keep reading VRFocus.
Wolves in the Walls, the VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave Mckean’s classic children’s book by the same name, reaches its thrilling conclusion with the release of Chapter 3: They’re Everywhere! out today for Oculus Rift.
From the opening moments of the first chapter to the closing moments of the finale, Wolves in the Walls is a gripping, emotional story that feels not only enhanced by existing exclusively in VR, but feels like that’s the only way it could be experienced.
In it you take on the role of Lucy’s seemingly “imaginary” friend that she draws out of chalk. When no one believes her that wolves are living in the walls she has to create someone that will.
“No one believes Lucy, so she had to go as far as to create someone who does… that’s why she created us, the audience, her imaginary friend,” said Jessica Shamash, Wolves in the Walls VR co-creator. “A companion, someone who will listen to her and go on this adventure with her. We are responsible for creating the inciting incident. By taking a photo, and getting evidence of wolves, you send Lucy on her quest. It’s as if you gave Harry Potter his wand, or you steal the bicycle in The Bicycle Thief. Your actions are that important. It’s not Lucy’s picture who gets proof, it’s yours. You finally provide the evidence she’s been looking for.”
Lucy doesn’t just exist to let you watch her experience things as a passive viewer, but looks to you as an active participant throughout and the degree of believable interaction on display here is a spellbinding kind of magic that I hope to see in VR far more often going forward. The team at Fable managed to make me truly care about a fictional, digital character.
It’s both the small things, like how she believably follows you with her eyes and seems aware of your physical space inside the digital world, and the major things, like how she speaks with you directly and remembers your actions. Those memories and callbacks to previous Chapters in the narrative and further establish Lucy as a virtual character that really feels alive.
“This is an experience about togetherness, a relationship between a character, Lucy and a person, You,” say co-creators Pete Billington and Jessica Shamash. “This is about a child’s imagination and taking you back to your childhood friendships. The feelings where anything was possible and everything was larger than life. It’s seeing the world through an 8-year old’s eyes. We go so far as to rescale you to Lucy’s height, which creates this intimate bond and connection so you are literally seeing the world through her eyes. You’re not just watching a character’s story, you’re a part of it. “
At the end of Wolves in the Walls: They’re Everywhere! there is a tease of what’s to come next. The next step in the story is Whispers in the Night, which will further lean into the memories Lucy has formed with you and carry them over into the forthcoming new experience. Whispers in the Night is reportedly focused even more on building and expanding your relationship with Lucy so I can’t wait to see where things go next.
Fable have done incredible work with Wolves in the Walls — even winning an Emmy for their efforts — so I’m absolutely strapped in for wherever they take me next.
The entirety of Wolves in the Walls is available FOR FREEfor Oculus Rift on Oculus Home today as of 10AM PT and we highly recommend checking it out. Additionally, Fable is putting on the Virtual Beings Summit on November 19th in Los Angeles, CA with speakers from the worlds of virtual assistants, influencers, and machine learning/AI.
Over the last few years, there have been several virtual reality (VR) projects nominated and even successfully taking home an Emmy Award. This week, creative studio Fable and its project Wolves in the Walls achieved the coveted award. In doing so, helping lead character Lucy become the first virtual being to win an Emmy.
Wolves in the Walls: It’s All Over (Part 1) won the primetime Emmy Award for ‘Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media’, a project which was a VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave Mckean’s children’s book. Originally an Oculus Story Studio project, when it closed Edward Saatchi and Pete Billington co-founded virtual beings company Fable, taking on the project with support from Facebook.
The story follows Lucy, a young girl who has a seemingly vivid imagination until events prove that that isn’t the case. She hears noises within the walls convinced that wolves are making the eerie sounds, and the only way to keep them at bay is believing they’re real. As an interactive story, you accompany Lucy around the house helping fend the wolves off while none of her family believes her.
One of the main aspects of Lucy is the fact that she is one of the earliest examples of a virtual being, an AI-powered character with which viewers can build a two-way friendship. Thanks to machine learning Lucy will interact with viewers in natural ways, helping build a greater emotional connection. Fable also has plans to introduce memory, so that viewers actions will have consequences in later instalments.
“Sometimes when you are exploring in the dark it’s comforting to know that others are not too far away, hands outstretched, searching alongside you. It has been inspiring to be part of this juried award category. We are humbled and grateful for the encouragement and recognition,” said Pete Billington, Creative Director and co-founder of Fable Studio in a statement.
“This is the first Virtual Being project to receive an Emmy but it won’t be the last. Virtual Beings from Lil Miquela to Mica, from Alexa to Lucy are revolutionizing storytelling and beginning to harness machine learning to create meaningful relationships with us. Eventually, a Virtual Being will win an Oscar for their performance in a live-action movie, win a Grammy for best album of the year, be your favourite celebrity on Instagram, your favourite spiritual guide and, eventually … your OS,” adds Edward Saatchi, Executive Producer and co-founder of Fable Studio.
Virtual beings are going to become more and more prominent as developers strive for greater immersion within VR worlds. To check out the experience for yourself, Wolves in the Walls: It’s All Over can be downloaded for free for Oculus Rift/Rift S. For further updates on the project, keep reading VRFocus.
