Just in time for Easter, you can buy a pet rabbit in Sinespace (a media partner to New World Notes), and unlike most virtual world pets, Buddy Rabbit is special, built on a complicated AI architecture. As seen above, Buddy can inquisitively explore an area, flee from trouble -- even doing flying spin-leaps to get away from pursuers -- and follow its owner.
Well, somewhat follow: “You see the rabbit is a wild animal and is difficult to control him exactly,” Buddy’s creator Kokostar warns me, grinning. (He's Kokostar #1902 on Discord.)
A leader in the Swiss Society of Virtual and Augmented Reality, Kokostar has been creating virtual pets in Sinespace for over a year: “I have always been interested in agents which simulate human or animal behaviors.”
His first attempts at pets were rather mechanical, however, so he turned to a sophisticated back-end structure, to give them more life:
“I have implemented a new Subsumption architecture for the algorithm.” (As you can read here, it's a very influential approach to creating autonomous robotics and real-time AI.) “This gave me the possibility to add many behaviors very easily...”
Right now Buddy has six behaviors (exploring near its owner, avoiding obstacles, navigating stairways, and so on), with ten more coming soon in future updates. Buddy will be able to play with a ball, eat a carrot out of your hand, and even play with other pets created by Koko for his Avantgardvision line of artificial pets and accessories.
“[T]his is the best virtual world, at least from the creators’ point of view,” Kokostar tells me. And he plans to even more sophisticated creatures in Sinespace:
“The most interesting point with the Subsumption architecture, at least for the programmer like me, is that it is modulable,” as he puts it. “I can build and add behaviors like LEGO bricks as much as I want and modify the behavior of the robots in the future, incorporating all new ideas I have.”
@trr troll
@Kokostar & Hamlet Very cool. AI pets may achieve that edge of unpredictability and disobedience that real pets do.
Posted by: Wac | Saturday, April 03, 2021 at 05:47 AM