Fable Studio brought Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean’s Wolves in the Walls into virtual reality (VR) over a year ago, treating viewers to not only a charming interactive experience but also its vision of AI-driven storytelling. At the heart of this is Lucy, who takes you on a journey into her imagination. Today, Wolves in the Walls has arrived for Oculus Quest whilst the studio introduces the next iteration of AI interaction.
Previously released in chapters, Wolves in the Walls for Oculus Quest features in its entirety, allowing viewers to step into Lucy’s world. You play the part of her imaginary friend, helping her discover what’s hiding inside the walls of her house and stealing her mum’s jam and glitching her brother’s games. Clocking in at 40 minutes, the title won the primetime Emmy Award for ‘Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media’ in 2019.
Fable has also been exploring how AI – dubbed Virtual Beings – can be used to create and enhance interactive stories by providing natural responses to conversations and remember who they’ve been talking to. The team has created Fable Wizard, its own in-house platform which utilises artificial intelligence technologies like GPT-3, procedural animation, synthetic speech, speech to text and AI memory to enable you to have a conversation with Lucy via social media.
This method means that you don’t need any additional apps, you’ll probably already have a compatible one on your phone such as Zoom, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, TikTok and Twitter.
Having run the alpha project in stealth these last few weeks Fable now wants to offer more people the chance to encounter the next stage of Lucy’s development. To see this in action it’ll be releasing a limited number of tickets to sign up for video calls with Lucy, simply sign up here.
Fable isn’t the only studio delving into the world of AI to create new storytelling avenues. Exploring dynamic filmmaking, Transitional Forms and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) released Agence where you could switch on Reinforcement Learning AI to see how individual characters would change their behaviour to each other as environmental changes.
Wolves in the Walls is available now for Oculus Quest, retailing for £6.99 GBP. As Fable Studio continues to improve its Virtual Being technology and AI-driven character become more widespread, VRFocus will let you know.
