“Set Phasers to stun! No, don’t actually set Phasers to stun. I was just saying it to sound cool. Keep Phasers where they were.”
Star Trek: Bridge Crew is getting voice commands, which means instances like the one above may soon be a reality. Announced today, Ubisoft is partnering with the IBM Watson platform to allow players to issue commands by speaking aloud in the soon to release VR game. The developer is making use of IBM’s new software development kit (SDK), which is also being made available to other developers.
Bridge Crew will add early beta support for IBM’s VR Speech Sandbox later this summer. The game itself is set to launch on May 30th on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR (PSVR). We’ve reached out to Ubisoft to confirm that this support will be available on all three platforms and not just PC-based VR.
IBM’s platform combines the Watson SDK for Unity with IBM’s Speech to Text and Conversation technologies, supposedly allowing you to issue orders to your AI-controlled virtual shipmates with natural language.
Imagine shouting “fire torpedoes” or “beam them up” from inside VR and watching one of your crew actually listen to you. The support will work with both single and multiplayer modes, so you’ll be able to handle multiple people’s jobs from your captain’s chair. It won’t, however, be able to record your Captain’s Log.
We’re just a few weeks away from the launch of Bridge Crew now and UploadVR is your one stop shop for everything you need to know. We’ve got weekly coverage of the game with our Trek Tuesday feature, which yesterday covered the Engineer role.
