VIRTUAL BEINGS

We build #BehavioralAI that brings 3D characters to life. Powering #GameDev, #Metaverse, and beyond. Meet #KuteEngine in action: @ForeverPets_✨

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

Gorilla Tag-style movement is great for high-energy VR, but it has real UX costs: nausea unless you're a kid, no hand tracking, and both hands tied up for locomotion.

So we created a new type of grab-based locomotion. 🧵 1/5

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

If you're still debating how much agents can actually help with gamedev in unity, here's a few numbers: earlier this year, Claude Code & Codex helped us decrease D0 churn by more than 30% and increase revenue for by 50% in less than 8 weeks. Meta just posted the break-down.

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

One week after launch, Forever Pets has D1 retention of 46%, and it's still climbing.

I'm told successful VR games average 25%, because of the friction of using headsets.
https://t.co/IAbvaOYqTD

[Forever Pets @ForeverPets_]

Yay, @Fynnpire played our game and liked the birbs! https://t.co/pNYZQbrdyD

[Forever Pets @ForeverPets_]

📣LIVE NOW: VR pets that feel truly alive. Play for free on Meta Quest.

No scripted behaviors - just companions that learn, grow, and bond like real pets.

It’s not just a game. It’s comfort, company, and connection - whenever you need it.

Try free: https://t.co/gRs7CIWoCu
#vr #vrgame #metaquest #gamedev #virtualpets

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

After a decade in behavioral AI, I made a VR pet game.

It started as a tech demo. Then my daughter played the early builds like the pets were real, and I knew we had something special.

To those of you who can't have real pets: I hope Forever Pets gives you some of that joy.

[Mikameel ᯅ @augmentedcamel]

@virtualbeings https://t.co/HS9uH8LOnf

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

I often get asked if we use Behavior Trees for the birds in Forever Pets. The answer is no, and here's why:

1. Constrained parallelism. BTs offer only limited parallel execution. Most implementations (for example, Unreal Engine's Parallel node) require one child to be a single task node. Real people and animals do lots of things on overlapping timelines. The body of Aria below in the video has more than a dozen things going on at any given moment (root, head, eyes, tail, breathing and so forth).

2. Low reusability. Trees and animations are tightly coupled: you end up reinventing behavior branches for each new creature instead of sharing generic logic across species.

3. Poor scalability and performance. As you add actions or richer environments, tree size (and its CPU footprint) grows exponentially. In a VR game with dozens of pets, that quickly becomes unsustainable.

4. High production overhead. Every tree demands dedicated behavior designers, animators and engineers to craft and maintain bespoke nodes, leading to heavy people-costs.

Let me know if you found this useful and I'll long-tweet more about BTs and the alternative we've developed (Behavior Composition).

PS: Do you like Aria's red hat? That's the exclusive reward we've added for our alpha players. Join the alpha to claim it, link in first reply!

[Forever Pets @ForeverPets_]

Dear long-time followers, we have some good news. Tender Paws is being reborn as Forever Pets for VR.

If you like cute little birds, please join our alpha (link in comment). If you prefer cats, fear not, they are coming too. In the meantime, give us a like to make FP a success!

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

Hey VR friends! Forever Pets is now in closed alpha. You teach and care for little birds that feel believably alive, thanks to our behavioral AI. It's the culmination of 10 years of work.

We're looking for a few animal-loving testers. Link in reply! 🕊️

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

Another XR design breakdown by @benz145 that will be an instant classic.

My takeaway is that 'immersion' isn't really a design goal for XR because it comes free with the platform.

Instead, strive for embodiment. Allow players to use their bodies to interact with your world in unique and meaningful ways. If you get this right, you will give them superpowers they couldn't experience in any other medium.

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

SceneScript is a bigger deal than most people in XR will realize at first.

For years we've been saying that "XR and AI need each other". This wasn't just riding the AI hype-wave, and it's now clear why.

-> Generative AI is moving gradually towards realtime 3D, from text to images to video to 3D. This was always inevitable because the world is 3D, and GenAI needs to understand better it in order to be more useful. Yann LeCun regularly talks about the fact that LLMs don't have a world model - yet. Enter Large World Models that represent not just text, but objects and their relationships. Meta's research leads the way in making 3D worlds palatable to modern ML architectures.

-> Realtime 3D in general, and AR/MR in particular, desperately need to become smarter about space in order to weave the real and the virtual together. This is currently a huge bottleneck for MR devs like ourselves who want virtual objects to interact with real ones in your living room - but don't want to have to build custom infrastructure for scene understanding.

Meta's research represents a real, meaningful collaboration between their AI and Reality Labs. My best guess is that many more will follow, and that this will create virtuous feedback cycle between their AI and XR efforts.

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

The (educational) virtual pet idea got the most likes in @tipatat's thread - and it's what we're building @virtualbeings. Take a look at our vertical slice on App Lab and let us know what you think!
https://t.co/sFLqqcou2h

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

We often get compliments for the quality of our "animations". In reality it's all procedural - we built an engine that synthesizes plausible movements automagically. As a result, interactive behaviors like this can be created in 1-2 hours.

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

Celebrating #Disney100 and exploring the legacy of 'Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life'!

At VIRTUAL BEINGS, we’re inspired by these 12 principles to enhance our approach to #AI character interaction.

Full insights here 👉 https://t.co/WJ3yKuC2ej

#gamedev #behavioralai

[Sebastien 🏞 @borgetsebastien]

💯agreeing with @DrJimFan. I think there will be a point of time we won't be able to distinguish if we interact with real humans or virtual agents and NPCs within virtual worlds.

Metaverse platforms are looking to drive further engagement in their virtual world, (re)inventing social interactions and the way we communicate with each other. The Creators Economy and Economy of Attention are closely connected and will further be.

Besides @nvidia, companies like @inworld or @virtualbeings among many others are building solutions for platforms like @TheSandboxGame @decentraland @Roblox @FortniteGame and many others to integrate easily

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

Seeing Digi's "AI girlfriends" explode over the week-end was weird yet still expected.

As a dad and a co-founder of @virtualbeings, it makes me worry & think about our responsibility here. What we're doing in behavioral AI can unfortunately also be used to make AI girlfriends more immersive. This tech can end up being 10x more powerful and damaging than porn.

We all better end up on the right side of history.

[VIRTUAL BEINGS @virtualbeings]

🎮 Episode 4 of our #BehavioralAI Interview Series is live! Meet Ahmed, Tools Developer —and time-saver — as he presents his mission to empower creators with the tools they need to unleash their full potential!

🔗https://t.co/0ubMRfQwAS

#ToolDevelopment #GameDev

[VIRTUAL BEINGS @virtualbeings]

🎬 Missed our CEO-CTO's talk at AWE EU 2023 in Vienna? Dive into the fusion of Behavioral & Conversational AI in XR with @wendelinreich.

📺 Watch now: https://t.co/ElHZ0TZ5ak

#AWE2023 #BehavioralAI #VR

[Wendelin Reich @wendelinreich]

Just read this cutting-edge deep-dive on text-based NPCs with GPT-4 by @soi. My thoughts:

1. Reed uses not one but four (!) calls to GPT-4 per turn. It starts by generating dialogue, then filtering it and linking it to game systems.

https://t.co/UxGmI5ESCu