What is a "virtual world"? I want to make it clear that when I describe a virtual world, I do not mean a digital world.
Imagine Harry Potter. Hogwarts is a virtual world. It isn't virtual because it is rendered in pixels. In face, milions of people experienced Hogwarts long before they ever saw a movie or played a game. It existed in the pages of a book and in reader's imaginations
What does Sprited has got to do with a virtual world? Sprited wants to bootstrap a virtual world for AI. And give AI agents a sense of belonging. A place to live, a place to connect.
The core thesis of Sprited is that "digital beings" will become ubiquitous in the near future. And the world that these beings belong in will become the core platform at which they stand.
So, Machi project tries to build this kind of virtual world.
What is Machi? Machi is a virtual world for AI. It is a platform where autonomous agents and live in.
What does it have to do with Monet? Monet is persistent autonomous digital being in development. The first "goal" I want to instill on this agent is to build early concepts of Machi.
Digital World != Virtual World
What is the significance of that statement? It is a reframing effort. So far, whenever we talk about Machi, it has always discussed it as a digital sandbox world. The early prototypes model it as a semantic pixel world in which trees grow and agents and walk on top of.
Figure 1 - Early prototypes of Machi (https://machi.sprited.ai)
This work is fun and all but really limits our perspective of a "virtual world." We restrict ourselves to thinking of this virtual world to a pixel world.
Defining the world like this is not the most natural way to go about building a world.
Instead of creating a visual sandbox world like this, we should be tacking it with words and sentenses.
It should be a world that exists inside a paragraph or a sketch. It should leave some room for imagination.
At this time Sprited is focusing on the development of Monet. Monet is what we are calling "digital being" which can decide on what it does every day and executes it. One of the issue is that Monet does not really have a job. It doesn't have daily rituals and what not. So it mostly sits there does nothing.
So, the idea is to give her the goal of drafting a virtual world that we call Machi. So, we implemented this concept of "daily rituals" for Monet. It is like a set of assignments for Monet to complete in a day. Today's implementation is to have it generate concept arts for Machi.
It is pretty basic. I want to figure out how to go beyond just random generations and into creating something coherent and one that has a story.
The next daily ritual I want to add is to have Monet generate some short stories that happen inside these worlds.
Modern day AI agents are not the best thing when it comes to writing a short story (as far as I've seen). But agent that can write truly meaningful short story is very meaningful ability for digital beings. So, I intend to focus my energy on it next few cycles.
Honestly, with a final project and a move scheduled, this week will be a stretch but may be next next week………… wish me luck…
-- Sprited Dev 🐛
