AILien

Overview

AILien is a VR experience that turns your room into a portal to the cosmos. It’s centred around an unexpected extraterrestrial visitor, a meteor that lands in your space. This meteor is a VR companion that users can have endless conversation with.‘Telothar’ is a poetic, cosmic intelligence that arrives not to crash, but to connect, providing users with a companion who helps them explore their own thoughts, one meteor landing at a time.

Inspired by the discovery of the Knyahinya meteorite in 1866, this is an interactive narrative experience that combines an NPC AI engine with VR to create a companion that can respond to questions about the universe and more.

People increasingly crave grounding, introspective, small moments of calm and reflection Meditation apps, journaling apps, and wellness tools are passive and easily ignored and monotonous. AILien creates a safe-space that uses the novelty of an unexpected visitor to encourage the user to explore the ‘big questions’. It becomes a daily/weekly check-in, a comforting presence and way to externalise thoughts and feelings.

It’s not a productivity tool, not a game, not meditation as we know it - but a new category: a VR companion that merges storytelling, emotional wellness, and non-human intelligence.

How we built it

We used the Convai NPC AI Engine to create a voice character that had the personality and responses of a cosmic oracle. We used MetaSDK incorporate this into a Unity scene. We also used the VR Optimiser by Valem to speed up the final stages of development.

The assets include 3D scans of the actual Knyahinya Meteor, environmental design assets using hand drawn sketches that were converted to 3D models using AI and an original score and sound design.

Challenges

The first challenge we encountered was controlling the scope of the project. The ideas for narrative and interactive elements kept expanding and so we had to focus and make sure that we were aligned on the core features of the experience. We had to adapt to the time limits and experience of our team and judge what was realistic within the timeframe without losing the heart of the project.

Another key challenge was working with the ConvAI NPC Engine, it doesn’t immediately integrate with the MetaSDK so with the support of our mentors we had to go into the code and start manually changing elements.

Accomplishments

We’re really pleased with the level of optimisation we were able to achieve in the amount of time. The NPC AI Engine slowed the experience considerably, creating a loading screen every time the microphone was turned on. Through editing this API and extensive visual optimisation we were able to reduce the delays.

This was our first time using the Convai Engine, this took considerable amount time to come to grips with but we’re really excited to explore this tool further.

What’s next

We have many ideas for expanding AILien.,

One step would be to expand the narrative elements of the experience including the descent of the asteroid. This would include more scenes and more complex interactions.

We’re also interested in using spatial anchors to have the meteor align with physical objects in the room e.g the meteor aligns with a beanbag. This would also include using passthrough and reskinning the tracked objects in the room to match the environment e.g pillars become trees.

For wider expansion, we would be interested in creating more characters with different personalities that can increase the interaction. We also feel multiplayer could add an interesting layer of interaction.