Deep Space Connection: An Immersive AI Story

When you wake up from cryo-sleep, a bubbly AI robotic companion greets you; the only thing saving you from being alone.

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AI Connection in Deep Space

  • Imagine you are a astronaut exploring deep space. It takes 40 minutes for a message to come from Earth Mission Control to Mars. Communication with Earth takes too long to solve problems onboard a spaceship quickly and accurately.
  • Deep Space Connection is a VR experience that puts you in the role of the astronaut onboard a spaceship many many lightyears from Earth. Without easy access to human assistants, you interact with a holographic AI assistant, Cutesat, who assists you in repairing spaceship components, navigating across planets, and simulating human-like companionship.
  • This is a narrative game with PCVR-quality graphics, hand-tracking, and next-generation LLM interactivity.

Features

  • In VR, press a button on your hand to speak to Cutesat, a sentient AI companion.
  • The AI character generates responses in real-time that can help you fix spaceship components and navigate the planets.
  • The AI floats to areas of the spaceship like the spaceship's bridge, the engine needing repair, and the star map navigation, providing assistance visually.

How we built it

  • Unity 2022 URP
  • Ultraleap Unity plugin with OpenXR hand-tracking
  • Whisper API for speech to text
  • ChatGPT API
  • Maya
  • Substance Painter

Challenges we ran into

  • We initially started building in Unreal Engine 5 to have high quality graphics, but pivoted to Unity due to its versatile hand-tracking, VR interactions, and AI integration.
  • After switching to Unity HDRP, we pivoted again to Unity URP.
  • Everyone on the team was very passionate about the direction of the story, and we would have never had time or scope to fulfill our vision, so there was a lot of difficulty and time spent talking about how to narrow it down significantly and make everyone happy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Rylan's Artificial Intelligence and interstellar hyperspeed effects
  • Eli's very high quality and thorough robot dialogue and movement system
  • All of Tom's very high quality 3D assets
  • Jack choosing and programming all of the music and audio for interactions in the game
  • JC's Ultraleap interactions and storyboarding

What we learned

  • Implementing both real-time AI conversations with a non-player character, as well as VR hand tracked that interacts with the environment in a physics-based way.
  • Navigating various creative visions within the team to establish a more robust, sophisticated concept.

What's next for Deep Space Connection

  • If we were able to continue working on it, we would flesh out the story and interactions to have a dynamically-evolving, impactful storyline with multiple plot points.
  • We'd also like to place the assets from the level in a VRChat world so we can visit it as a spatial memory in the future.

Inspiration

Narratively driven retro sci-fi movies and AAA games with polish and passion:

  • Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet
  • Alien: Romulus
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • Outer Wilds
  • Lone Echo's P09-CRN, you will be missed
  • Niko's Exoplanet Journey and Solar System VRChat worlds

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