PERLA™ — enabling end-users to create compelling videogame, VR / metaverse experiences

How Perla works

You’ll start by dropping visually realistic characters into your own 3D environment, and setting up cameras. You’ll be able to give your characters rich personalities that will come through in the way they speak or act. They will have a memory of what they’ve done, seen or heard. They will understand what you tell them, and they’ll be able to converse – and sound smart, or dumb, or however you want them to. Their physical interactions with the 3D environment and with each other will be directed through language (imagine how easy it will be to create cutscenes for videogames!).

Origins

For over 20 years, North Side has been developing situated Natural Language Understanding to enable characters to manipulate objects and understand their 3D environment.

We started experimenting with using English for character control in Bot Colony more than 15 years ago. In Bot Colony _redux, we’ve given personalities to characters, and facial and gestural animation amplify the lines that Angel and Hades are delivering.

It was a natural next step to scale up this idea of controlling characters using language, enabling end-user control of character actions and verbal behaviour in any setting – just using English and point-and-click – and  package it in our Perla™ tool.

Applications and benefits

Perla is an end-user tool. This means that end-users will be able to create the kind of experiences described above without the help of animators or programmers. Language-driven character animation is 10,000 times faster than traditional animation and enables 3D storytelling by anyone. The removal of the programming barrier by Perla™ will enable a new asset economy for language-enabled assets, that will benefit many creators.

Perla™ has multiple applications in storytelling, simulation, work process design, visualization and training, film previsualization, mission or business planning, presentations, etc.