Mark Drummond From Encounter Dinosaurs In Apple Vision Pro To Pixi Garden on iPhone

A new free app called Pixi Garden (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixi-ga...) available on iPhone brings eye contact and interaction to cat and robot characters sent through messages. The co-founder and CEO behind the project, Mark Drummond, sat for a conversation on the Good VR Podcast to talk about his path to develop these bite-size interactions after working on the impactful Encounter Dinosaurs experience on the Apple Vision Pro as well as Siri before that. “We created the character intelligence team and worked with a variety of Hollywood studios to do that,” Drummond said. “We worked with Disney and Marvel. We worked with Kevin Feige on the Marvel Universe, and we worked with John Favreau on a variety of things. The one that shipped there was the Encounter Dinosaurs app. So we learned a few, I think, interesting things in the character intelligence team working with these Hollywood studios. It’s pretty easy to do AR, but most AR is just sort of an animated idle position overlay on the real world. And one of the things that we learned is that if IP characters’ backstories come to life in such a way that the characters pay attention, then things feel present. It feels present. So it needs to react to sounds as you think would be appropriate, react to movement, the introduction of objects, the disappearance of objects. Like as a person, if there’s a cup on the table, and then you look away and you look back and the cup is gone. That empty table is really interesting to you because there was a cup there. But from a traditional sort of machine learning perspective, it’s just empty table. Why are you excited? Well, I’m excited because there was a cup that is no longer there. So that style of paying attention brings these characters to life, makes them feel present.” Our conversation covers the Encounter Dinosaurs project and why he’s decided to start with these short-form interactions on iPhone. We spoke for around 40 minutes on the recording platform Riverside edited down to just under 25 minutes. This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation (https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3e...) to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe (https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/su...)