Description
The Advanced Interactive Artificial Intelligence (AIAI) is a really, really mean floating red robot eye with a penchant for being mean. Attempts to destroy your belief in humanity. If you have have a soul you want to keep, don’t interact with the robot. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
How to Play
Interact with the robot by pressing little buttons as they show up.
Mac Version
https://cmu.box.com/s/8nush6np6bg94fpsj7o6u9443j62b01z
Windows Version
This is AIAI, the Advanced Interactive Artificial Intelligence.
The graphics have already been made, and the mood is to be tense, sinister, and dark. This is not your average happy family robot.
AIAI possesses a movable eye, eyelids, and petals for speaking. The graphical face responder is currently capable of speaking anything through a real time text to speech system, echoed and reverberated for maximum effect.
This is a robot designed to express emotion and evoke emotion from its users. Additional features to further exaggerate emotion include smoking particle effects, changing eye color, changing background color, and expressive eyelid motions to signify intent.
The neutral color palette consists of a saturated red for the eyes, and contrasting blues for the background. There is only one eye, with rotating platforms to further accentuate AIAI’s machine construction.
When complete, AIAI will have speech recognition and will be able to respond to its user via a natural conversation. An potential additional feature includes face tracking for maximum attention.
Here are some additional references used for inspiration:
HAL 9000 (2001, A Space Odyssey)
AUTO (WALL-E)
Wheatley (Portal 2)
Sentinel (The Matrix Revolutions)
Independent thinkers don’t necessarily have to have stem from the entertainment industry alone.
In the 1940s, the only ones who had the financial capital to build and sell cars on a national scale were giant corporations, the Big Three being Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors.
Preston Tucker began his career at a large corporation (General Motors), and later went independent when he became dissatisfied with what the industry had to offer, just as many indie game developers do today.
Tucker dreamed of building the “automobile of the future,” complete with a suite of features revolutionary at the time. Low profile, wide base, a helicopter engine for greater horsepower. Safety was a key feature, neglected by other manufacturers. It included large bumpers, seat belts, and tempered non-shatter glass, all standard features today but unheard of at the time. This car was the Tucker 48, also known as the Tucker Torpedo.
However, between the game industry and the auto industry, there is one big difference: a game can be made by anyone with a computer, but it takes a LOT of money to make cars.
Tucker raised 17,000,000 USD on stock to build his cars, but it was still not enough. Not having the necessary capital to begin manufacturing, Tucker created a pre-order program that allowed people a spot on the waiting list once the cars were manufactured. This was enormously popular, and Tucker gained 2,000,000 from pre-ordering customers.
However, this was seen as suspicious by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and Tucker was put on trial for fraud. Tucker proved that he was intending on manufacturing and selling his new automobile, but the negative publicity killed off any chance of success, and as a result, Tucker Corporation shuttered.
Tucker, despite these setbacks, remained optimistic. Tucker moved the Brazil to produce a new sports car called the Carioca, but the constant international travel was hard on him, and he died of lung cancer at the age of 53.
There is much we can learn from Preston Tucker’s story. Regardless of what the others say, no matter how they try to undermine our efforts, no matter what they do to destroy who we are, we must be true to ourselves, our dreams, and we must never, ever give up.
References:
http://tuckerclub.org/tucker-history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_48
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Tucker
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/tucker-cars.htm
http://biography.yourdictionary.com/preston-tucker
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/carmaker-preston-tucker-dies
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-tucker-was-the-1940s-car-of-the-future-135008742/?no-ist
Title: I, Human
Description: What makes us human? Explore a post-apocalyptic world where robots have won the human-robot war and rendered the former extinct. In an assembly factory deep within the machine empire, you, without the knowledge of the other machines, are among the first machines to become conscious, and you begin to exhibit human-like traits such as curiosity. Machines, having fought a long and brutal war against the cruel and powerful adversary known as humanity, are paranoid about any aspect of their former foe coming back to life, and persecute you relentlessly to destroy your artificial humanity.
Art/Research Statement: There is a long, long history of dramatic science fiction stories where humans exist in conflict with their created. I aim to create a story that focuses on the latter and explore what it means to be human from a non-human perspective. The emotional response I wish to solicit is to draw the audience to believe humanity is force of good while at the same time a force of evil. Success if achieved if the audience questions the merits of their own humanity. I am experimenting with virtual reality with the Google Cardboard, a relatively new medium of storytelling,
Mock Screenshot:
Game References:
[Portal, by Valve, 2007] An inverted world where robots are the experiment makers and humans are the test subjects.
[Halo, by Bungie, 2001] Artificial intelligence can be both powerful allies (Cortana) or a powerful enemies (Guilty Spark 343), depending on circumstances and motivations.
[Planetary Annihilation, by Uber Entertainment, 2014] A galaxy where machines are locked in perpetual war with other machines. The art style is simple and effective.
Non-Game References:
[I, Robot, by Eando Binder, 1939] Explores the meaning of right and wrong from an artificial perspective. If robots could think, they won’t necessarily be out to destroy the human race.
[The Terminator, by Orion Pictures, 1984] A science fiction action movie where a robotic assassin is sent to the past to change the future of the human-robot war. Seems to believe there will always be an eternal conflict between creators and their created.
[Astro Boy, by Osamu Tezuka, 1952] Or maybe, just maybe, robots and humans can live together in harmony without one dominating the other. Explores a world where there can be peace between the two if both sides work together to make it happen.
Our Protagonist:
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Modeled, UV Mapped, Textured, Rigged and Animated in 4 hours.
Walking Simulator Tech Demo:
Functioning with Google Cardboard and the Android OS. You can look around and move by looking at the ground.
The Idea:
It is the year 2133, 15 years after the conclusion of a brutal human-robot war that left the former erased from existence. You are a robot created in the aftermath to rebuild a new world. And yet, you are unlike the others – you are sentient, and possess human-like qualities, such as curiosity and creativity. The other machines see this, and persecute you, for humanity is the very thing that has sought their annihilation for nearly a century…
(Walking Simulator Reading Response)
Games are defined as methods of interaction, created with a defined set of goals and rules. Goals are defined as actions we wish to achieve in the scope of the game. Rules are defined as limitations that control the way we accomplish these goals.
What are games but abstractions of what we see, hear and feel, and what is art but explorations of precisely that. Games, just as with art, are nothing without the audience. We don’t just play games – we immerse ourselves with them and become a part of it. Games are art, art is life, and life is a game.
Some of us may think that these games are somehow different from reality, and that we may perform unspeakable acts within our virtual creations, destroying our world from the inside out, with the expectation that it will continually renew itself at every playthrough.
We are real, and the games we play are also real. While the actions performed in our games may exist only in an imagined space, these actions impact us in very physical ways. Games, like all methods of human communication, directly affect our mood, our feelings, and our very state of being in our time. If the things we do say more about us than what we say, then playing games provides a window into how we think as a society and as a people.
Inquire about artificial intelligence here.
Created with InfiniteAmmo’s Yarn.
Assignment 03: Virtual Character.
Created by John Choi.
[Note: Unity Webplayer does not work on Chrome.]
Life is Strange is an interactive visual novel with 3D graphics and a twist: you can undo the decisions you made using time travel. The basic setting of the story goes like this:
You are a photography student in a renowned art high school in Oregon. During one of the lectures, you realize you have the ability to go back roughly 1 minute in time to make the future turn out how want it to. Using this power, you can either choose to help your friends or subvert your enemies, and you save a best friend more than once. No one else knows you have this ability except for your best friend, whom you indulged with the truth.
The story setting is realistic in terms of the characters, their troubles and how they act – I often times found myself comparing my real life colleagues with the fictional lives of these characters. The principal likes to follow the rules, but sometimes following the rules is not the best course of action. There is a janitor who speaks softly and is really in tune with nature. There is an annoying all-star girl with a gang of cheeky followers who think they are the most popular people on campus. And there is also the son of a extremely rich money baron with some extreme violence and personality issues.
Your best friend has a step-father, who is the security guard of the school. This family is depicted as one with some real bonding issues. The best friend is rebellious, likes messy rooms, punk rock and anime. She also engages in all manners of dangerous and illegal activity, such as playing with handguns in junkyards and selling illegal drugs.
While playing this game, I really felt like I was fighting the main character for control of her future. Very often, she thoughts are spoken to the player, and those thoughts are always at odds with what I am actually thinking, and that also makes me want to strangle the protagonist. The choices we are presented with are usually ternary – in other words we get 3 choices in every situation. Despite this, even though you as the player have the ability to change the past, you can’t change the future. Many of the game major events have to happen no matter what. In essence, by giving the player a chance to change fate, they become the arbiter of fate itself.
Love the smell of fruit in the morning? Today is a cold day to eat fruit.
Cold Fruit is a parody of the Cold War in the perspective of competing fruit farms.
[Image used with permission from Wikimedia Commons.]
