The Education of Ursula
The education of Ursula is an interactive exhibit where guests play a game with an artificial intelligence to create objects from hopeful futures. Guests engage in dialogue with an “unapologetic AI” that uses image, text, and voice generation to guide players through a game called The Thing From The Future, in order to spur conversation about the ability and role of AI in our future.
Achievements
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A Symphony Of Generation
Using Inworld, Nvidia ACE, local image generation and ChatGPT prompts, coordinated through the Unreal Engine, Ursula is able to verbally respond to you, create various images of you, the thing you have created, and the future you envision.
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Game Engine Integration
Unreal’s robust plugin ecosystem and great out-of-the box visual fidelity helped drive the avatar: Metahumans interfacing directly with text emotion detectors were able to depict a fully procedural, highly expressive main character.
My main challenge in this project was making sure the experience felt cohesive and thematically connected even though AI tools from five different companies were being used. Tackling the delays caused by real-time generation was also a huge concern. I resolved these problems by setting up a mix of real-time and pre-authored content, as well as stress-testing the various AI tools to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas where one would be better suited than the other for a given problem. As a result, I have gained a much deeper understanding of the role of AI tools as an intrinsic part of game design and development, as well as an increased mastery of the Unreal Engine, Metahumans, and other technical aspects.
Interested in learning more?
The overview for this project can be found here.