Travel with Wander in the Metaverse: An AI chatbot to Visit the Future Earth

Abstract

We developed Wander[00l] as an experiment to discuss several visions toward the metaverse: through crowd contribution, how an AI agent can become a highly accessible storyteller, and how to link the virtual and physical world through AI-generated content (AIGC). In this artwork, we implement a hybrid AIGC and user-generated content (UGC) system to facil-itate a narrative AI chatbot, Wander, that produces interactive fiction through knowledge graphs with text messages input by users on instant messaging social platforms. On Discord and WeChat, Wander can generate science-fiction-style travelogues about the future earth, including text, style-transferred images and global coordinates (GPS) based on real-world locations (e.g. Paris). The crowd interactions with Wander are visualised on an interactive globe map in real time, documenting the players' asynchronous contributions to exploring the speculative future earth. This paper presents Wander's concept, development and user study to demonstrate how people would interact with an AI agent in a narrative context for the future metaverse.