Oasis, a mobile social game that just launched in May, has already garnered over 3 million registered users and entered the top 10 social app charts in 15 countries without the development team spreading the word upfront.
Soon in August, the virtual social world Oasis will welcome a number of new residents. They are not only cute, with a fascinating spirit emanating from beneath their fluffy fur, but they also reveal a bit of quirkiness in their conversations and movements, as well as a fittingly snooty temper.
At first glance, the furry kitten can talk, interact and be fed, like an upgraded 3D version of Tamagotchi and QQ Pets; however, if we try to communicate with it and interact with it in depth, we will definitely be shocked by its excellent intelligence and rich dialogue content.
Undoubtedly, this is not an electronic pet in the traditional sense, but a true “AI pet”, or as rct AI defines it, “the first generation of native virtual species born in the Metaverse”.
After an extended period of companionship, this kitten will understand you more and more and become your emotional support in the virtual world. It knows what is the best time to wake you up, knows what type of friends you enjoy playing King’s Glory with the most, and knows where to take you to meet someone your heart desires.
Perhaps in the past it was difficult to understand how a digital image could have such a deep emotional connection with us. rct AI’s Chaos Box algorithm allows us to truly see the mind and soul of virtual creatures, driving their every move in the virtual world.
The first step in “creating the world”
We often wonder what words the navigators who discovered the New World in the 15th century would have used to decorate and praise a place where woods and rivers live naturally, where birds, fish, and all kinds of beasts live at ease.
While some may define it as “a new and uncharted land”, the more commonly accepted term is “New World”
On the journey to the Metaverse, rct AI always hopes to leave a rich and colorful mark in its own way, drawing the experiences and lifestyles belonging to the future. For the world people dream of, such vivid and lovely virtual creatures with different personalities will be an essential component.
As the natives and basic units of the Metaverse, these virtual species, created by rct AI, will continue to forge ties with us beyond humans and across races in the infinite future of time and space.
As the first electronic pet to use GPT-3 and reinforcement learning technology, rct AI and Oasis have created “AI pets” that are fundamentally different from all the virtual pets we’ve ever seen.
First, there is the difference between passive projection and active thinking
We’ve had our share of AI conversations in the past, but they’re essentially closer to “language search engines”: when you type a sentence of dialogue, it pulls a sentence from the corpus in response. This means that each virtual pet requires an extremely large amount of upfront engineering to develop, and cannot generate multiple virtual characters at scale. In addition, the same virtual character will reply to the same conversation with anyone, making it impossible to personalize the experience.
What rct AI is doing has been completely different from the beginning.
When we look back a decade later, rct AI in 2021 is one of the pioneers in the application of generative dialogue technology to the gaming experience. Rather than pre-scripting the AI with a massive amount of scripted language, we’re going to let the AI think through every interaction with you by using a generative dialogue system powered by the Chaos Box algorithm, based on constant analysis of the user’s intent and thinking about how to respond to various communications — as we humans do every day.
Secondly, it is a differentiated emotional experience based on “character”
In the past, virtual pets and virtual companions also had many “personality” settings, but the script based on artificial presets has become increasingly unable to meet the delicate human emotions. At the same time, the difference in the experience of different personalities in traditional AI relies mainly on the corpus to differentiate, and developers will rack their brains to restore a personality, but the result is often one-sided, deliberate and subjective. Such an AI is just a well-dressed puppet, never having a soul that can freely express itself.
However, rct AI always insists that the real character should come from the AI’s self-exploration and discovery, and whether it has the subjective initiative to transform the world with its own consciousness is the biggest difference between virtual species and artificial products.
In Oasis, each kitten is a unique individual, with different personality parameters that bring about different conversational expressions and styles. At the same time, as players interact more with the cats, they will gradually become familiar with the player’s temperament and preferences, and adjust their personality in real time and dynamically, so that it is infinitely closer to the form that the players would like to see.
Beyond that, there is the logical rationalization of behavior
At present, we often use the term “two-way” to describe the process of developing a relationship between two people who have a mutual affection for each other, and with the support of rct AI technology, the cat and human in Oasis also show a “two-way” relationship.
The player’s daily words and actions will not only affect the cat’s personality, but also directly affect the way they behave. If we always hold a brutal attitude, the cat will gradually become very timid, revealing its fear between words and actions; while gentle care and affection will make its dependence deepen and bring us a family-like bond.
At the same time, when we take our cats out to interact with other players, they will take the initiative to make a variety of behaviors to other cats or players. For example, a playful cat will take the initiative to pamper itself in front of you or other players, expecting to be petted, while when it sees a cat it doesn’t like, it may take the initiative to go up and fight with each other.
In Oasis, all the behavioral logic of any cat is driven by rct AI’s Chaos Box algorithm. Not only are they smart and intelligent, they are also skilled in the ability to read people’s words, and when facing different players and cats, their behavior will change in subtle ways accordingly.
Of course, there are more interaction possibilities waiting for each player’s personal exploration, and we believe that these cats with intelligent consciousness will bring us more surprises and happiness.
So, how is it achieved?
Commenting on the AI pets in My Oasis, rct AI CTO Zhang Yan said:
“In terms of results, for the concept of virtual creatures, we didn’t do much to innovate on previous frameworks. Our work is essentially just some minor work to make virtual creatures evolve to more reasonable and interesting effects in the three areas of corpus generation, logic generation and behavior generation.”
“At the same time, this is not the first time we have used generative dialogue to enable such an interactive experience. This technology has been applied to Nüwa, the NFT artwork that sold for the highest price in the room at an auction held by Yongle auction not long ago. This was all achieved based on rct AI’s own Chaos Box algorithm.”
In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion about “virtual people”, “virtual idols”, “virtual anchors”, “virtual KOLs” and “virtual celebrities” have emerged in droves. They are eager to share their “happy life” on social networks by appearing in fashion magazines, engaging in brand linkage, and imitating real idols, emphasizing their “unique and outstanding” taste.
Like a mid-summer morning, after the sun rises, everything on the earth is restlessly agitated, as if everything is about to spill out, and as if the wind is close at hand.
Essentially, these are only exploring the realm of “avatars”, touching the boundaries of the Metaverse with art and animation effects. However, we stayed focused and chose a very different path than it appeared:
We want to give virtual creatures a soul.
We believe that even beauty that never dies can always be replaced, and what ultimately captures the heart must be the resonance from the soul.
Under the Vault
Although there is no unified concept of what constitutes the Metaverse in 2021, almost everyone agrees that the Metaverse must have three important elements: self-growth, sustainability, and scale.
For current Internet offerings, whether it’s the much talked about GTA 5, The Witcher 3 or Breath of the Wild, it took a lot of manpower, time and budget to produce content that would only satisfy players for hundreds of hours of gaming experience.
The current manufacturing model resembles a traditional handmade workshop with the aid of machinery. From a certain point of view, perhaps the game “God of War 4” and the delicate silk imported from the East in the streets of Florence in the 15th century does not have any essential difference.
This requires mankind to jump out of the traditional handicraft thinking, and what awaits mankind will certainly be a new industrial revolution.
And what rct AI is doing is driving this process to happen faster. We are sure that AIGC will be able to greatly improve development efficiency while providing developers with inspiration at will, so that we don’t have to write large amounts of similar code over and over again to generate thinking, sentient virtual species at scale and have them spread throughout games, social networks, and the entire virtual world.
After several iterations in the future, AI pets will gradually become human assistants, partners, and even lovers. The many virtual creatures will gradually form tribes, villages and cities, becoming the so-called “world” in the eyes of humans who later enter the Metaverse.
No one can resist the steel flood of the mechanical age rolling forward, and only AI content generation can reach the true Metaverse.
At the same time, we are convinced: the human desire for freedom is the soul’s deepest longing. But for too long, all the choices humans have made have not escaped the restraints of developers, always dancing in shackles.
In the Internet of 2021, humans think they have read an article, watched a video, or completed a few tasks in a game with their so-called free will. However, the NPCs and conversational AI we are dealing with are just machines performing tasks, without thought or character, just empty shells without souls. Website editors determine what we see, and game designers determine the game experience we will experience.
We believe that more natural experiences and lifestyles should never be limited to the flow between screens, but rather be brought and transformed in a mind-flow state. If virtual pets are a tangible representation of people’s experiences and interactions in the Metaverse, the abstracted virtual beings will replace the current Web and App as the objects of interaction in the Metaverse.
With the awakening of human personalization and the need for productivity advancement, AI will take over all this, generating personalized content for each person, creating different virtual worlds for each person, and allowing each person to become the protagonist of his or her own story.
We expect that the moment we reach the Metaverse, when we face a virtual world built by native virtual species, all of us will be able to express the words that have been repressed in our hearts for years:
“Ah, freedom.”
