Unlike the Convai-powered human NPCs we were recently discussing, AI-powered animals are far more interesting, believable, and frankly, appealingly un-creepy. So if you're interested in the best and latest in AI-driven virtual creatures, here's a chance to get a free Alpha preview of Stay: Forever Home, an upcoming mixed reality game for Quest headsets where you go on adventures with Ember, a magical, multi-color dawg imbued with its own unique life. (Watch some gameplay footage above.)
Click here to request early Alpha access to Stay: Forever Home.
Lead developed by game industry veteran Bernie Yee, the game promises much more than caring for a simple virtual pet.
Ember comes, Bernie tells me, with "a personality axis, multiple quirks and preferences, biological state."
Ember's AI code, he explains, "was taken from Sims AI and LMNO, the secret Spielberg game which didn't ship." In that defunct project backed by Steven Spielberg, a player would have escorted an alien creature called Eve across the country. So Ember's soul, so to speak, is distinctly Spielbergian.
"You add the AI into the mix with a dynamic environment and other (dumber) critters, it's pretty magic," says Bernie. "There was a build I played, a month ago, pre-DICE. i choked up because she felt so alive. So much of this is ALSO procedural animation, so it doesn't look like she's replaying animation timelines robotically."
Exploring a virtual world with Ember leads to some interesting emergent gameplay:
Metaverse Platforms Need to Appeal Beyond Their Core Player Community, or Face Slow Death (Comment of the Week)
Good points by "EmptyEyes", reflecting on how algorithms tend to homogenize metaverse platforms:
This connects nicely with the recent conversation around advertising Second Life. It's a mistake to create a marketing strategy based on what only seems to be the most popular activity in SL -- social fashion roleplay -- when that ignores the many multiple niches of other communities creating content that has a proven existing market. For instance:
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Posted on Monday, March 24, 2025 at 02:29 PM in Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (0)
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