I’m always amazed at how little I hear people talk of interactive story in the virtual world’s industry. Then again I commonly hear doubts at the capabilities of AI at the moment. You’re more likely to find chatting with an AI powered intelligent virtual agent annoying than entertaining. However I think the key to fixing that isn’t necessarily better technology but more character and context.
As long as we see this as a technology problem I don’t think the opinion of the industry will change much when concerned with AI and interactive story. The bar is too high. Whenever we see an intelligent virtual agent we think of the Turning test. The test itself demonstrates that many tinkering with intelligent virtual agents are more worried about showing off their programming prowess than making these things useful in their current state. Maybe they believe if they can perfect the technology everything else will follow?
What we need is character to soften the rough edges, to make these intelligent virtual agents a little less annoying. When I spoke with the people from Novamente at the Virtual Worlds conference, they seemed to be more concerned with improving the technology than worrying about character at this point. Even though, they had built in some rudimentary character settings.
Then I came across a French company, MASA Group, openly working on autonomous intelligent virtual agents for interactive storytelling. They were showing off videos of their project Fairyverse.
However when I visited Fairyverse in Second Life I didn’t see the rich interaction found in the demos. Once you teleport you’re quickly informed that the autonomous intelligent agents are still very experimental. I couldn’t get the two who greeted me to do much else than respond to keywords with canned messages. My initial interest quickly turned to annoyance, but it is also likely that their best AI wasn’t on display when I visited.
I am however hopeful that Fairyverse will advance quickly; they certainly have a strong emphasis on character. They also speak of interactive story which could add the context to the equation. Done right we might actually forget that we’re conversing with an intelligent virtual agent.
Paving the way to interactive storytelling
We strive to develop the solutions for creating virtual interactive stories in which you and your friends are the heroes
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