Cute Assistant to Tell Stories (CATS)

• 

  Meoooow! Time to tell a story!

Inspiration

I got the idea of a storytelling companion from one of my undergraduate colleague's thesis which discusses about a chat bot that tells stories to children and at the same time learns and converses with them. Although my submission is only an effect that reads a story based on a simple user interaction and not an actual chat bot (e.g. Google Home), I am inspired with the interactive possibilities that AR can bring in the future.

What it does

The cute cat reads to you The Hare and the Tortoise story (shortened cut audio clip for demo purposes) when a user taps Play Story. The cute cat also appreciates your affection and meows while changing the background particles when you pet it!

How I built it

I got the cute cat model from Sketchfab and built the animation and effect using Spark AR Studio v.83. I made use of the following:

1) Interaction Patches (Screen Pinch, Rotation, Object Tap) - to trigger interaction and animation for the cat model

2) Animation Patches (Loop Animation and Transition) - to animate the cat when it is tapped and when it reads the story

3) Audio Patches (Single-clip, Multi-clip controller, Pitch Shifter, Reverb) - for the background sound effect, the story audio clip, and cat meowing

4) Animation Sequence - to change the background particles when the cat is tapped

Challenges I ran into

One of the challenges I ran into was finding a suitable audio clip in the right format. Of course majority of the story audio clips I found was in the .mp3 format, and I tried to convert them to the required .m4a format for Spark online; however, the converted .m4a file still cannot be imported into Spark. What worked for me was I had to use a 3rd party software Audacity to manually edit the audio clip (e.g. splitting to mono, adjusting the bit format and Hz rate, etc.) into a correct .m4a format. Another would be that some capabilities like background segmentation and camera texture cannot be rendered into Instagram as an effect, so I omitted these effects to be able to test it in the Instagram app.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

1) My long-search for the perfect meow audio file was worth it XD

2) I'm glad that the pitch shifter and reverb patches for the meow sound effect came out well and sounded natural.

3) I'm also glad that the loop animation and transitions for the cat came out smooth

What I learned

1) There are abundant resources such as Sketchfab.com out there that has a ton of ready-made 3D models you can download and play with for Spark AR Studio.

2) Spark AR Studio patches are very useful and the studio is a great platform for creating AR experiences.

What's next for Cute Assistant to Tell Stories (CATS)

I envision that in the future AR models can be interactive chat bots as well-- being able to learn speech input via microphone and in turn converse with users. For CATS, it could be the next favorite children story companion :)

All this wouldn't be possible with leandrodreamer's cute cat model and Storynory children audio clips!!!!!!

Built With

• sparkar