3D Interactive Avatar
A life-size interactive 3D avatar for Volkswagen Autostadt Wolfsburg that held conversations with visitors through speech recognition and voice synthesis.
Sensors noticed a visitor, and the avatar started talking and offered a set of topics. From there the conversation followed a non-linear storyline. We wrote the storylines about the history of Volkswagen, and for the conversation I designed a keyword system with several trigger words and fallback questions, close to how people talk to each other.
We photographed a Volkswagen worker from several angles and built an animatable 3D model from the photos, with a set of gestures and facial expressions to use as poses in our animation editor.
Also designed the editor, and it worked in real time like the rest of the system. Stories are written in it and enriched with facial expressions, gestures, images, videos, sound effects and music, and links connect one storyline to the next. The client could change the content at any time, down to the wording for the speech synthesis to get the pronunciation right, and see the result immediately.
I designed, planned and led the prototype with a team of three 3D artists and five programmers, and delivered it on time and on budget.
