Building a Holographic Oracle Digital Assistant
Ok.. Ok.. I'm not building it.. but I am dreaming of it.. I can dream right?
Hey! - If anyone at Oracle would like to sponsor me.. I wouldn't say no to the chance to build a Virtual Holographic Digital Assistant built on ODA..
But for this post - lets talk on how I'd actually pull this together
- just encase anyone wanted to sponsor me :)
Now... we've all seen holograms in films; the small DIY Pyramid holograms you can make and buy and even more recent fancy commercial holograms ie. Epic by Proto.
This is all cool.. but let's simplify it down and make it real and something we could stand up quickly at a conference, in a hotel lobby or in retail.
What if we created a large two-way Smart Mirror; displaying an avatar hooked into ODA (maybe allow the ability to integrate it with one from Ready Player me - so you could customise and create your own digital assistant avatar?).
Rough list of initial build materials
- Two-way mirror (Preferably Glass)
- Picture Frame
- Monitor
- PI + Camera + Mike
Then there is an awesome open source modular smart mirror platform here -
And also a great guide and walkthrough on creating a Smart Mirror - https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Smart-Mirror-1/
Once built..
Create a MagicMirror module - https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror/wiki/3rd-party-modules
Essentially a Web UI component that connects to ODA using the integrated mike to enable Voice to text - with an initialization keyword such as "Hey Artie..." to start the recording of the voice - additionally we could build in eye tracking so that chat was only initialised once eye contact with the digital assistant had been made.
Building or choosing a Digital Assistant to Integrate with..
Next the Bot.. You know what would be great.. Oracle have an official bot called Artie running on the web - it's a next generation Oracle Digital Assistant for Re-imagining Learning and much more!
Digital Assistant Avatar Integration
We connect Artie to our virtual display!
Next the visuals - I mentioned ready player me.. We can use AvatarWebKit it's a quick way to create an interactive avatar and also works with ReadyPlayerMe avatars!..
Hallway-IncNext Text to animated avatar speech - what we can do is programmatically needs a little work I couldn't see anything prebuilt..
What about other animations to make the bot feel real? - That's pretty easy; we can programmatically pre-record our expressions and use those with the avatar..
ie no one has interacted with Artie show bored animation.. or someone walks past and doesn't make eye contact get Artie to stick his tongue out - additionally it's possible that we can also integrate and use the eye tracker to make the avatar eyes follow the user.. That's cool right.
That's my quick intro on how I'd build an interactive avatar running on Oracle Digital assistant..