AV++® Technology - Alice® Platform

Alice® Avatars

Personal guides who can accompany visitors throughout a venue

Why AV++®?

A guide for the whole visit

Alice® Avatars can guide, educate and entertain visitors throughout their visit. A chosen expert, character or host can welcome someone on arrival, introduce the next exhibit, explain what they are seeing, respond to a question and continue a story in the next gallery. The experience can move between participating displays, interactive stations and supported personal devices, with the appropriate presentation at each touchpoint. Explanations, vocabulary and narrative depth can be tailored to the visitor’s age, interests and chosen level of detail, as well as language and accessibility.

With CheshireCat® and the visitor's permission, the guide can continue with their language, interests, chosen depth and the parts of the story already explored. A visitor may keep the same guide or meet another expert who picks up the relevant context. A physical location change does not have to mean starting the conversation again.

Live at Mad: Samtoo

At Mad's headquarters, Samtoo, our Virtual Receptionist, is a live Alice® Avatar. Samtoo greets staff and visitors and adapts the interaction to the relevant context. It is a working example of a digital host participating in the daily life of a physical place.

Samtoo establishes that digital-host demonstration. The personas, languages, touchpoints, recognition, speech and rendering selected for another venue are defined for that project. A working receptionist does not establish every proposed avatar integration.

TECHNICAL DETAIL

Continuity with the visitor's consent

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A temporary session can remember the visit without creating a lasting member profile. An opted-in member can choose to retain selected preferences and progress for a return visit, allowing a guide to offer, for example, "Welcome back. Would you like to continue where you left off?" The greeting follows the retained context and the visitor's choices.

The venue defines what persists, for how long and how a visitor can change or remove it. A group of venues can offer shared continuity where that has been explicitly authorized. Recognizing a visitor at one location does not automatically share their information with another.

Explore CheshireCat® visit and membership options.

TECHNICAL DETAIL

Local intelligence. Venue-controlled knowledge.

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Each persona draws on the venue-approved Alice® Body of Knowledge. Curators and educators establish the sources, interpretive position and permitted content. An avatar's personality changes how the story is presented; the institution remains in control of what is being taught.

Mad demonstrates Alice® working with a local large language model. This advances the path toward personal guides whose sensitive visitor context and venue knowledge remain inside the venue, or an authorized group of venues. The full deployment also accounts for speech, avatar rendering and other connected services so that their data paths respect the same boundary.

Explore Alice® and local intelligence.

TECHNICAL DETAIL

Sign Language Avatars

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A signing-avatar application can add American Sign Language (ASL) to an authored experience. The signing and presentation must be developed and reviewed with qualified sign-language practitioners for the intended audience. It is a supplementary presentation option and does not replace a visitor’s required interpretation service.

Why Everyone Wins

Guests

Choose an expert, a character or a host, each drawing from the same venue-controlled Alice® Body of Knowledge. The guide can continue a language, interest or narrative thread across participating touchpoints and offer something new on an opted-in return visit.

Curators and Educators

Keep editorial control of the knowledge, sources and approved interpretation. Update the content, introduce a persona for an event or build a new narrative route. Analytics, where included and permitted, can help the team understand how the experience is used.

Leadership & Finance

Build on adaptable QuickSilver® computing infrastructure, with modular upgrades and supportable hardware. Membership continuity, repeat visits and optional premium experiences can be designed into the venue's operating model.

Accessibility

Connect multilingual narrative, authored ASL, appropriate content depth and supported personal listening. With Lory® and the selected endpoints, the visitor can receive the agreed access formats as the story continues.

Design a guide around your story.

Tell us whom the guide should represent, what the venue has approved it to teach, which visitors it should serve and where it should accompany them. We can identify the demonstrated capabilities and the content, rendering and integration needed for your experience.

Discuss a visitor companion Ask about the Samtoo demonstration

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Why Are We Doing This?

Five monkeys parable illustration

Five New Monkeys

There is a well-known parable about five monkeys. It is not really about monkeys. It is about what happens when a group keeps enforcing a rule long after the original reason for that rule has disappeared. In AV and Location Based Entertainment, that pattern shows up all the time.

Five monkeys are placed in a habitat with a ladder in the middle. At the top of the ladder hangs a bunch of bananas. Naturally, one of the monkeys climbs the ladder to grab the bananas. When it does, the researchers spray the rest of the monkeys with cold water. After a few attempts, the monkeys quickly learn the connection.

Banana = Cold Shower.

Before long, whenever a monkey even tries to climb the ladder, the other monkeys pull it down and beat it up to stop it.

  1. One original monkey is replaced. The new monkey tries to climb. The others attack. It learns not to climb - even though it has never been sprayed.
  2. Another original is replaced. Same result. The new monkey learns the rule.
  3. This continues until all five originals are gone.

None of them have ever been sprayed. None of them know why.

But none of them will climb the ladder. And if a new monkey tries, the group will still beat it up.

Why?
Because that is just the way things are done.

That is how large parts of this industry still operate.

Too many teams inherit technical assumptions from the last project, then production assumptions from the last technical stack, then budget assumptions from the last production model. Eventually those assumptions stop looking like choices and start being treated like physics.

Much of that behavior comes from designing around proprietary black box hardware. Once a system is built on closed, single-purpose devices, everything downstream begins to conform to their limitations. Workflows. Support models. Spare strategies. Upgrade paths. Before long, entire organizations are protecting the ladder - without asking whether the ladder still needs to be there.

We chose a different starting point.

We built a system that bases AV hardware on non-proprietary compute node hardware rather than on closed black box endpoints. That decision changed the problem space.

  • Hyper-personalization became possible - behavior no longer had to be locked inside fixed-function hardware. Experiences could become adaptive, contextual, and individualized in software.
  • Spares were minimized - standardized around a smaller family of node types instead of a growing inventory of specialized proprietary devices.
  • Upgrades became easier - increasing capability often means increasing compute available to a node, not replacing entire subsystems.

We did not set out to defend the old ladder. We set out to remove the reasons people thought they could not climb it.

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