Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Lin.
Hi Michael, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I grew up playing video games and watching anime.
I build a virtual assistant to help me with scheduling back in high school using windows widgets.
When I was in University, I experimented with building virtual assistants on the iPhone that could answer, delay, notify my phone calls. I also built the virtual assistant to be able to help me analyze the potential outcomes of CSGO esports matches whenever I came back to my dorm.
In my final years of University, I wanted to build a headset where a virtual character would be present to be the user’s virtual assistant. Unfortunately, this project did not pass group voting.
I traveled to the USA and looked for opportunities to immerse myself in cutting-edge tech. that is where I found Magic Leap.
I formed a small team 3-5 people and started developing on the magic leap. I had a glimpse of the future where it may soon be possible to have users interact with a virtual assistant while these assistants are augmented into the real world.
After having the learning experience developing on the Magic Leap One, Wonders.ai was founded in 2018, and our mission was to create the world’s first platform where users can interact with their favorite virtual characters.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
When starting wonders.ai it was not a smooth ride. As a sole founder and limited capital, it was difficult to find people/ recruit people who shared the same vision. My first couple of hires were senior people from the gaming industry who had experience in creating mobile games. They did not agree with my vision and had the tendency to sway the direction of the product into building what had already been done or fit a certain existing infrastructure. What I wanted to build was something new with no predecessor, innovation was required so I stuck to my vision and assembled a new team from scratch, leading the development and design myself. I am hands-on with everything. From a 6 people team, we managed to grow to now a team of 16 people. In the next two years, we participated in many projects, garnering experience, growing our finesse with AI and augmented reality technology.
The first project we started was we developed a MR dining experience where users could walk into a store, slide their phone into a headset provided by the restaurant and experience a mixed reality dining experience with a AI waiter. We successfully launched this experience in Shi-Men-Ding in Taipei Taiwan. Although the experience was soon discontinued due to the global pandemic, we started gaining notoriety with many institutions. By 2020, We have developed a foundation where our AI can become anyone given any context/ data and interact in real-time with users physically and verbally through augmented reality on the user’s smartphone. I had a lot to prove as why this platform would work and had to demonstrate to potential investors why virtual characters powered by AI is the future.
When the pandemic hit full force, we started working with a kindergarten preschool chain where children (ages 3-5) were stuck at home and parents needed a way to keep children could learn, focus at home. We developed an App where kids could dance alongside a virtual character at home and interact and learn English. We worked with the NTU university to produce a virtual character that can teach students to detect, people with suicide tendencies.
Continuously we worked with a hospital and implemented an AI virtual patient that could test students in the OSCE examinations, training students to diagnose and treat endocrine and edema conditions. With these projects under our belt and ongoing, we have shown the robustness and flexibility our platform and garnered additional capital to start venturing into the industry we ultimately want to target. The anime and gaming industry.
Our AI platform we call Wonderverse. This platform can create AI companions from any type of virtual character. Our AI can learn the backgrounds of virtual characters and synthesize their respective voices all in real-time. In 2022 we started collaborating with Vtubers. Our vision was to provide vtuber fans the ability to still interact with their favorite vtubers offstream as we believe this is a very big, missed opportunity. Furthermore, we wanted to elevate the way fans interacted with their favorite Vtuber. Currently on streaming platforms such as twitch, and youtube. Fans are only able to interact via chat with these vtubers. We introduced augmented reality live streaming where fans can interact with these vtubers in a physical space.
Using this momentum we have expanded our business operations into the USA, South east asia, and also Japan. We believe this year 2023 we will start making dents in these industries we are in.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We define our company wonders.ai as an AI company developing new ways users can interact with virtual characters powered by AI.
Interaction on mobile AR is mostly limited to on-screen interactions, button presses. On the other hand, Handtracking is commonplace in most VR and MR devices. Without relying on third-party SDKs, we wanted mobile users to also can use their hands to interact with the AR content in front of them. Thus, we also developed ahand-tracking system powered by our AI for users to be able to physically interact with augmented reality content on their smartphone devices.
With the release of GPT-3 and chatGPT, I think the public must be accustomed to thinking that AI can be easily integrated into any system or perform in any application. The reality is it is difficult as running large language models, especially in the cloud with multiple users costs a lot and often the cost is too large for a small startup to bear. Continuously, large language models cannot be loaded onto portable devices such as the smartphone. As a result, our vision gave us the challenge that we needed to come up with a solution where we had an AI model that’s lightweight yet powerful enough and flexible where we could alter the data fed into our language model such that our AI can become any character we want it to be. As a result, we had to build from scratch our AI model. Once we developed the language model, we also had to develop a from scratch text-to-speech model that we could control and change the AI’s voice to our liking that could operate in real-time. We also built that from scratch. Integrating all this into one single mobile app that’s powered by AI and AR sets the foundation that I am incredibly proud that my team can accomplish.
I think the differentiation we have and the advantage we have is that we have built mostly everything ourselves and in an optimal, portable solution. We continue to break boundaries and we only want the best for our users. We do not rely on third parties nor is our data controlled by others. We provide solutions that even large corporations in the same industry lack. This gives us the flexibility we need in tailoring our system suitable for many applications. In 2022 we showed many what we are capable of and We plan on unveiling more in 2023.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Looking back at what we have accomplished so far it is difficult to differentiate what was due to good luck or bad luck. This is because we are always problem-solving. We did run into many brick walls, but we were able to power through them. When we take this approach, the factor of luck is really diminished in what we are physically and mentally capable of.
I am confident that my team and I at wonders.ai can continue innovating and building upon the foundation we have and achieve our vision of creating for users the lifestyle with their favorite virtual characters.
Contact Info:
- Website: wonders.ai
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-l-b8b160133/
- Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/wonderplatform
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wonders-ai-inc/
