Join Guy Gadney, CEO of Charisma and Rianna for their talk at 9:45am EST on Dec 17th during the Metaverse virtual event!
The key to a successful Metaverse will be entertainment. In Hollywood terms, the Metaverse needs to make us laugh, and make us cry - make us feel something. We saw this hinted at in Ready Player One where the characters head into The Shining scene. Suddenly, they find themselves inside the movie itself as opposed to just watching it.
For the past few years, we have been working to deliver a technology platform that can deliver this sort of powerful character-driven immersive experience. This is not the dry world of chatbots or dialog engines which are designed for call centres or search engines. This is Charisma: designed to bring captivating and believable characters together in narrative universes.
Metaverses with experiences like The Shining are why we built Charisma. These are complex, multi-character stories where players influence character moods, memories and relationships. These are the next generation of interactive stories like Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, enabled by new artificial intelligence technologies like GPT-3, machine learning and natural language processing. Indeed the really exciting piece of this puzzle is that the next challenge is not a technological one, it is a creative one.
Steppenwolf, powered by Charisma
For this reason, we ran Charisma through numerous Writers Labs to make sure that we designed it to allow writers to focus on their characters and stories, not the code that sits behind them.
Earlier this year, we published a white paper outlining a Universal Character Model with the University of Southern California’s ETC, Digital Domain, Fable Studios and Dramatica which hints at a way that avatars should be designed for persistent worlds like Metaverses and endless narrative games. When storytelling is layered over the idea of AI chatbots, something magical happens. But it also breaks a traditional chatbot system whose goal is to get you in and out as fast as possible.
Charisma was built with entertainment as its foundation stone - much like the fictional narrative engine in HBO’s Westworld. Indeed as well as powering avatar-driven stories on mobiles, web, Unreal, Unity and VR experiences, we recently extended Charisma into the world of physical robotics. In the near future, perhaps Charisma will be used to power both the virtual characters in virtual worlds, and real robots in real worlds.
Charisma’s no-code storygraph designed for writers:
For the present day, our work with Hollywood studios, indie games producers, Metaverse companies and comic book publishers demonstrate that, as well as great Metahuman-style visual avatars, we need avatar behavior platforms like Charisma that can make fictional and real characters come to life in the Metaverse.
To test Charisma to its limits, we bought the rights to a fabulous 1950s sci-fi story which we are adapting into an immersive novel for release in 2022. We have a strong cast of over forty characters - all of whom you can converse with to influence the story. Our vision is that these experiences should be built into the core of every Metaverse to bring them life with virtual beings we want to meet and talk to time and again.
So within a year, expect that your favorite television characters will also exist in a Metaverse. Your favorite book will have Metaverse adaptations, and that Metaverses themselves will be where the best narrative game experiences exist. Because at the end of the day, we all love a good story and captivating characters. And after all, what’s an avatar or a Metaverse without Charisma?...
If you’re looking to bring avatars to life in Metaverses, contact Charisma, and see our presentation on Friday, Dec 17: The Characters That Live In the Metaverse - from Superheroes to The Shining
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