What are digital companions?
The need for companionship
It is holiday season, and many lucky people out there get to spend time with the ones they love and who love them in return. For the less fortunate, it may be an annual reminder that their social lives are somewhat empty. With 36% of Americans reporting that they “frequently” feel alone, loneliness has even been called “a new epidemic”.
This matters for a simple reason: companionship is a basic human need. True companionship is an end in itself rather than a means, and so it can neither be claimed from others nor be replaced by purely instrumental relationships at work.
Enter digital companions
As mentioned in a previous post, we at VIRTUAL BEINGS believe that digital companions — which can be anything from virtual dogs, cats or unicorns to cute robots and humanoid ‘sidekicks’ — have the potential to alleviate loneliness for everybody. Our vision is to build companions that augment relationships between people rather than replace them.
We define digital companions as embodied AI characters that advance companionship. This includes not only the experience of togetherness with an AI character, but also initiation, augmentation or nurturing of companionship between people or between people and animals.
What does it take to realize the mission of offering people companionship by — and companionship facilitated by — AI characters? That’s the challenge we’ve been working on over more than 10 years of R&D in Behavioral AI (more on that soon). We found that digital companions must have four qualities: immersiveness, intersubjectivity, individuality and interoperability.
The first quality: Immersiveness
Experiences are immersive if they can bring about immersion, which is the psychological state of being deeply engaged in an experience, fully focused and with all distractions blocked out. While games can be great at offering immersion, they’re also notorious for breaking it through…
- bugs,
- friction,
- lack of interactivity or
- lack of believability.
This is especially true for AI characters in games today, which frequently offend on the first two counts, and almost always on the latter two. The result is that they don’t feel alive, thereby violating players’ expectations and breaking immersion. This is remarkable because our brains are actually hard-wired to detect life-forms everywhere. For example, a few lines are enough to make us see a face. 8-]
The main challenge in creating immersive AI characters is to make them believable and deeply interactive. At a minimum, believable AI characters satisfy the 12 basic principles of behavior. Beyond that, they should also have a full range of realistic emotions, adhere to Disney’s principles of anticipation and timing, and act in accordance with the laws of the virtual world they inhabit. Our flagship technology, KuteEngine™, was specifically created to support all these features.
The second quality: Intersubjectivity
Have you ever approached a cute puppy, seen it wag its tail at you and given it a good cuddle? If so, you immediately knew that the puppy was happy to see you and excited about getting caressed. You probably didn’t think about it, but you and the pet managed to establish what social psychologists call intersubjectivity, or the state of understanding each other.
At a basic level, intersubjectivity can be established through shared perception. You and I see the same thing, and we also see each other respond to it coherently. For example, we might be walking together, and when both of us see the street light turning red, we stop at the intersection. At a more advanced level, intersubjectivity can also be established through interaction.
Intersubjective AI characters have to accomplish three things:
- Understand their (virtual) environment in the same way that the player do.
- Express their understanding via behavior that is natural and legible to the players.
- Interact with the players in a sequence of meaningful actions and responses.
If they fail to achieve any of the three, they feel alien and unreal. They walk into walls, evidently not understanding their environment. Their behavior is unnatural or buggy. Or their attempts to respond to players’ actions don’t make sense. This is a high yet necessary bar. Humans routinely achieve intersubjectivity with each other and even with their pets, and AI characters must be built to achieve it as well.
The third quality: Individuality
Many games today offer customized player avatars, and startups such as Ready Player Me even allow players to bring their avatars into various games. Nothing similar exists for AI characters just yet. Those we meet in games are generally the ones that all other players meet in the same games as well. The AI characters are instances rather than individuals.
This is fine when they constitute named IPs such as Triko in The Last Guardian or exchangable instances of a species such as Pikachu in Pokémon. But if you want to let players feel that some Pikachu is their Pikachu, or you want to allow every player of Fortnite to have a unique sidekick, you need to give your AI characters individuality.
At VIRTUAL BEINGS we’ve honed in on four dimensions that must be varied to turn characters from types to individuals:
- Art style and look
- Behaviors and activities
- Personality
- Preferences
Unlike instances, individuals can be personalized by players (if the developer so wishes) and eventually owned. This unlocks powerful psychological mechanisms such as attachment (the ‘IKEA effect’), investment and care, and allows new forms of social interaction between players, from virtual Kennel clubs and mixed guilds to realistic life sims in a not-so-distant future.
The fourth quality: Interoperability
In most games, AI characters are inseparable from the virtual world and therefore the game that hosts them, just like most other 3D assets. This feels normal to consumers because the AIs are typically created by the game’s developer, and also because they almost always depend on hard-coded assumptions about what can be done where with what kinds of objects that are available in this specific game.
AI characters that ‘belong’ to a specific game can’t truly be owned by players. We therefore see the need for interoperability as a corollary of individuality — the third quality — and ownership. Interoperable AIs turn ownership from an empty promise into reality, empowering players to decide autonomously where to meet and interact with their unique AI characters.
Interoperability is equally necessary when game worlds aren’t part of one developer’s IP, but a shared public resource. This is most evident with the premier shared gaming world there is: the real world as viewed through millions of augmented reality devices. If we want to realize the vision of the AR cloud and avoid siloing AR experiences into proprietary apps, assets such as AI characters must support ‘targeted’ interoperability at a minimum.
AI characters created by VIRTUAL BEINGS are interoperable by default, although it’s entirely up to the developer who uses them to decide where they can be spawned. For players who are granted ownership of an AI pet (or sidekick), interoperability has a number of advantages.
- The flexibility and freedom to switch between games and virtual worlds and bringing their pet along.
- The ability to connect and communicate with other players using their virtual pets, even if they are playing different games or using different devices.
- The ability to share their virtual pets with other players and form connections and relationships based on this shared experience.
- Enhanced realism and immersion, as players can use their virtual pets in a variety of different settings and environments, creating a more cohesive and believable game world.
For developers, the principal advantage of interoperable AI characters are efficiency and composability. Having AIs that are interoperable by default avoids repetitive work and introduces economies of scale. After all, making great AI characters is hard — much harder than creating just about any other type of virtual asset. Composability, on the other hand, results from the fact that interoperable AI characters, when brought from an existing to a new game, can be used to create new kinds of experiences. Unbundling AI characters and games will therefore help both to get better, all while empowering players.
The promise of digital companionship
Our modern world isn’t always great at satisfying our innate human need for love and belonging. We at VIRTUAL BEINGS believe that the solution isn’t to use less technology, but to make smarter use of better technologies. We see AI characters that live up to the four “I’s” — immersiveness, intersubjectivity, individuality and interoperability — as an enabler for a kinder and more companionable future.
At the same time, we’re mindful that any technology can be misused. We therefore consider our vision for digital companionship as a company goal that will be measurable via two KPIs:
- On average, do our AI characters alleviate the emotional loneliness of users, rather than intensify it?
- On average, do our AI characters decrease rather than increase the social isolation of users by strengthening their connections with others?
We expect that succeeding on these two KPIs will require many non-trivial technical and design choices. In that sense they are our North Star, and help us turn the promise of digital companionship into a reality.
This article was written by Wendelin Reich, the CEO & CTO of VIRTUAL BEINGS . He is a past fellow in psychology and AI at Stanford. He’s been passionate and dedicated to behavioral AI as well as gaming over 10+ years and created VIRTUAL BEINGS’ core technology. Valuable comments were provided by Werner Schirmer, Yin Zhang and Belinda Pham.
VIRTUAL BEINGS develops the world’s most advanced behavioral AI engine, with the mission to bridge the uncanny valley for AI characters, to offer people the joy of owning and caring for them, and to populate the metaverse with believable virtual life.
KuteEngine™, our flagship behavioral AI technology with 10+ years of R&D, creates AI characters that support the four “I”s: Immersiveness, Interactivity, Individuality and Interoperability. We are opening it up in order to democratize AI characters to developers of all sizes and to bring real AI companions to people. Sign up to KuteEngine™ Waitlist.
