AI-bnb is an accompanying game for users to interact and discover stories with virtual creatures. It is a reinvention of traditional digital pet games to help users feel more accompanied and emotionally supported.
How to improve the user experience of digital pet games? How to make the interaction between human and virtual characters more natural and authentic? With these questions on my mind, I created the game, AI-bnb. It is a reinvention of traditional digital pet games to help users feel more emotionally supported. In the AI-bnb game, you will run an Airbnb for AI (artificial intelligence) residents by inviting them to live on your hard drive for a while. You will live together with a virtual AI roommate, communicating and hanging out with each other. Features:
Users can interact with virtual creatures in natural and intuitive ways, like speaking and gesturing.
The virtual creatures have an independent emotion system and thinking systems to give users more random and vivid feedback.
The virtual creature can move between different devices, so the user can bring the creature out with mobile devices to trigger plots in different scenes.
Should a digital pet be in a petting relationship between users? After analyzing the relationship between human and none human-shaped characters in games and animations, I realized that it can be a mentor to help your growth, a trusted partner to fight alongside you, a neighbor, and even an aggressor. So in my game, I want to change the interaction pattern from a traditional parenting perspective to more like friendship communication.
Characters:
The term Ai residents include a bunch of characters that can be invited to your AIbnb. They have different Characteristic hobbies and capabilities. They will have unique thinking and emotional pattern to provide you with more random and authentic feedback.
Interaction features:
In this game, users can communicate with the ai residents naturally. like giving speaking, hugging, and high five. Also With the facial recognition feature, each user will have a separate profile that records different game histories, and the intimacy with the characters. The character will give responses based on your intimacy and what you did together before.
If you hold the phone to the camera And say let's go out! The character will be able to transfer from the pc to a smartphone and go out with you to trigger special plots in different places.
Here are some examples of what you can do when going out together with the character. First, you can meet new characters, talk and invite them to your AIbnb. Second, the character will send you messages based on the season. Location, and time.
Demo and technical details:
the demo is about the feature of bringing a real-world object to the virtual world. When the banana is detected in the camera, it will spawn a virtual banana in the Unity game scene. The position will be consistent to make the illusion of "giving" an object from real world to the virtual character
Users can hold fruits like apples, bananas, and oranges to the camera to feed the virtual character. I am using the ML5 human skeleton library to locate the hand joint, combining it with the ML5 object library to recognize objects in the area around the hand joint.
