Ako

Project: Ako ( Ako Homepage )

Platform: Oculus+Zed mini+Leapmotion

Project Period: 2 months

Teammates: Zhaoyi (Ashley) Liang, Miao Ren, Sudha manigundam Raghavan, Urvil Shah

Supervisor: Melanie Lam, Carl Rosendahl

Overview:

Ako is an Entertainment Technology Center – Silicon Valley project that is creating a fun conversational Augmented Reality companion to help a player learn a table-top game.

People usually rely on instruction booklets, online videos or another player to learn the rules of a game. Very often, this becomes time-consuming and confusing.

To make this experience better/enriching and user-friendly, the team is exploring:

• AR technologies to make the learning experience magical/appealing while also retaining the fun of playing the physical table-top game.

• Speech Processing technologies to help the player have a natural conversation with the agent.

• Virtual character personalities to make the experience engaging and entertaining.

My Role: Designer & Artist

As a lead designer and artist for Ako, I designed, implemented and animated the main character in Maya, built the animator and scripts in Unity to make him lively and do real-time eye contacts. Also, I explored design challenges in virtual character personalities to make the experience engaging.

More information:

Ako Demo: WholeExperienceDemo

Ako Website: Ako