High Fidelity have announced that they have partnered with Limitless to bring Interactive NPCs to the High Fidelity Virtual Reality platform.
First things first, you may be wondering who or what Limitless are. Limitless have been making headlines for being a content creation platform for creating animated characters in VR.
Now they are making headlines for creating a toolset that allows people to create their own interactive VR creators, as Charles Singletary reports over at UploadVR in a chat with Limitless CEO and Founder Tom Sanocki.
I particularly like the view that Tom Sanocki takes regarding putting the perspective of the creator at the heart of creating an interactive experience :
“This means we always have something that is usable, simple, and shippable,” he says.”Our path to improving it always focuses on the needs of the storyteller, not the engineer,” he says.
I’m a huge fan of storytelling and Limitless aim to bring creation of artificial intelligence in VR to storytellers and creators, rather than those storytellers and creators also having to be experts in AI.
How does this fit into High Fidelity, you may be wondering? Well let’s go back to the High Fidelity blog post by Tom Schofield :
Limitless is providing an example framework for implementing NPCs using JavaScript in High Fidelity, a demonstration project to help users get started, and (most importantly) access to their back end servers to process user voice input. With our next update, we’ll also be adding a tutorial and demonstration domain that includes all of the code and features necessary to build and launch your own Limitless NPC.
The service will be available for free, including voice capture and translation. We anticipate that Limitless will continue to offer a free option going forward.
The way this works will be via interaction, including proximity and voice. This is where the power of the Limitless service is introduced, responding to those interactions to produce a response via a recorded voice track that will feed into spatialized audio.
Here’s a rather simple example of this :
High Fidelity will soon have a location whereby users will be able to experience the Limitless service in action and the results should be extremely interesting.
Whereas the service in High Fidelity is free to use, Limitless will also offer premium services, as the article on UploadVR explains :
Limitless VR will offer two types of interactive characters to work with: Standard and Premium. Standard characters respond to voice, gaze, gestures, and other input with the only bonus to Premium being that they have better voice recognition but, there will be future premium updates while standard characters will stay the same. Limitless Ltd will share more details on Premium characters in the near future.
This looks fascinating to me and I’ll be very interested to see what people create in High Fidelity and beyond using Limitless.
In the meantime, if you are just generally exploring High Fidelity, then keep an eye out for some familiar looking sights from a Second Life perspective.
