Announcing The Virtual Being Developer Grants (Guest Blog)

A Day at the Virtual Beings Summit brings hope for a new form of immersive entertainment.

By Edward Saatchi of Fable Studio, Organizers of the Virtual Beings Summit

Virtual Reality movies; immersive theatre experiences; augmented reality games — all incredible examples of how we have grown to enjoy immersive entertainment instead of the purely passive: theatre, cinema, literature.

I and my colleagues at Fable believe that there’s a new form of immersive entertainment to add to that list:

Virtual Beings

Virtual Beings are everywhere already — characters from lil miquela on Instagram and youtube and Mica from Magic Leap and even Lucy from Fable — characters that live beyond any one storyline and persist.

Our company Fable, creators of the immersive VR movie Wolves in the Walls (adapted from Neil Gaiman and Dave Mckean’s book), have begun to pivot to this new form of immersive media — Virtual Beings — that we believe will be the most accessible and immersive way for people to interact with characters and stories.

Imagine interacting with the story of a character over the entire course of your shared lives, imagine a being that, like us, is mediated in many ways accessible across many devices: So, you can talk to them on the phone, see them at home after a long day, video chat with them, WhatsApp them, see their Instagram post of their day while you were gone. Not only could you interact across many kinds of media — the Virtual Being would have an ongoing memory of you and your relationship together.

To honestly feel deep down that a character is truly alive — hasn’t that been the goal of so many artists from cave paintings to VR movies? Our desire to answer that question is why we’re hosting the virtual beings summit in San Francisco — bringing together immersive startups (Artie, Fable, Spirit AI) and big companies (Google, Epic/Unreal, Microsoft) gathered together in order to help seed a new virtual beings community.

That’s also why we announced today Virtual Beings grants — to help bring to life projects that the immersive community have related to virtual beings. $1,000 to $25,000 grants with submissions opening July 24th and closing September 17th 2019. See below for the details or visit virtual-beings-summit.com/grants.

What kind of areas fall under virtual beings?

• Digital Humans — photoreal versions of real people; imagine Oprah coaching you 1:1
• Virtual Influencers — characters like lil Miquela and Shudu that started on Instagram but have already moved into music, messages and red carpets
• AI Tools for Virtual Beings — virtual beings will need senses — sound, vision and AI can provide that
• Virtual Assistants — Alexa and Siri are growing quickly, but how long until they are embodied and we can see them?
• Creative AIs — AIs that can paint compose and write, so that the virtual being has creativity
• Avatars — digital versions of us
• IoT using a virtual being — access points for a virtual being to get to know us
• Enterprise virtual being applications — imagine your doctor being a virtual being and no wait times ; or be guided through a museum by virtual beings of the people represented there.

The virtual beings of the future might one day be part of our family, our friends, our mentors, our supporters.

A virtual being may even one day replace iOS and Android as our preferred OS and a way to interact with technology as in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ or ‘Her’.

Because a future AI-powered virtual being will be a work of art as much as a feat of engineering — so we have to unite these two communities. Indeed, The rise of machine learning since Geoffrey Hinton’s team’s Imagenet victory in 2012 has, for the first time given humans a new tool to bring characters to life. But machine learning and AI alone aren’t enough.

We need artists, writers, painters, gameplay designers, immersive theatre directors and actors, psychologists and neuroscientists working alongside AI engineers to do the seemingly impossible — build the first virtual being that we feel is truly real!

Virtual Beings Developer Grants is a new program announced at the Virtual Beings Summit July 24th, 2019 to build the Virtual Beings ecosystem.

• Grants range in value from $1,000 to $25,000 and winners will be announced October 15th, 2019
• There are four key Grant categories :
• Games — how we play with virtual beings.
• Enterprise — how a virtual being can assist us with our work
• Social — How a virtual being can connect us
• Education — how a virtual being can teach us things
• You will have until September 17th to submit your application via the form at virtual-beings-summit.com/grants. Send in videos, links, documents to show your project in the best light.
• Your work will be judged by investors, founders and researchers across the virtual beings space and winners announced October 15th.

Contact Us

EMAIL — vbsummit@fable-studio.com

WEBSITE — https://www.virtual-beings-summit.com/

GRANT PROGRAM: virtual-beings-summit.com/grants

The Virtual Beings Developer Grants were announced on July 24 in San Francisco, at the Virtual Beings Summit which gathered together for the first time startups together across digital humans, virtual influencers, virtual assistants, medical virtual beings, enterprise, artistic virtual beings and AR virtual beings.

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