Wolves In The Walls is out now on Oculus Quest and if you’re looking for a personal and meaningful interaction with a virtual character, we definitely recommend meeting 8-year-old Lucy.
The $9 experience is a told as a roughly 40 minute interactive story based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. We don’t want to spoil it for folks who haven’t seen it yet but people have found themselves deeply impacted by Lucy and her story. According to Fable Studio, when they released an earlier version of the Wolves In The Walls on Oculus Rift they created a website styled like an old bulletin board system which invited people to write letters to Lucy. They say they’ve received thousands of letters to her “and it showed that people wanted to continue to interact,” Fable co-founder Edward Saatchi wrote in an email.
Now that so many people are experiencing Wolves in the Walls on Oculus Quest, the studio says it is releasing a “limited” number of tickets to “sign up for video calls from Lucy.” They’ve got some details in a blog post explaining some of the technology behind the scenes powering Lucy, including GPT-3, procedural animation, synthetic speech and speech to text. Fable’s technology is even meant to include a kind of “AI memory so that the virtual being can remember and grow with you.”
The studio is also working on a follow-up experience dubbed Whispers in the Night, also featuring conversations with Lucy.
Here’s an example conversation Fable shared showing the technology in action:
Fable – AI Generated Scene 1 from Fable on Vimeo.
We haven’t had a chance yet to have a full-fledged conversation with Lucy just yet. The page to sign up for a chance to talk to Lucy is https://fable-studio.com/signup. If you try it out let us know in the comments how it worked out for you. According to Fable, they also plan to have Lucy send replies to folks who have submitted letters to her. The feature inviting people to write letters is coming to the Quest version of the experience as well.
