Gotenadi - Live Character Interaction (Unity)

Bringing AI Characters to Life

Developed real-time 3D characters that can see, converse, remember past interactions, and express distinct personalities, creating immersive, personalized experiences in an AI-powered mobile gaming platform built with Unity.

The Demo

The demo of our live character conversation technology consisted of two characters: Toomi and Moto. Moto was Toomi's talking hoodie. Both of their faces were created with Rive, rendered through the Rive runtime for Unity.

The character could react to a computer vision analysis of a snapshot of the user's camera feed.

I worked with our backend engineer to send the proper character definitions & set of memories and handle the responses, including emotes, text response and audio response (character speech).

I wrote a shader that combined the base textures on their meshes with the output of these Rive animations, allowing the faces to show up on the characters' meshes.

Lip Sync: The app reacted to phoneme events, which triggered updates to the state machines of the Rive animations. This allowed the app to animate their faces in sync with the audio.

I worked on triggering different skeletal animations and implementing a collision system that prevented the hands from going inside the body.

I built a parallax system similar to the one in OnlyBots that reacted to gyroscope data on iOS and cursor movement on desktop browser.

I built a captions system that would spawn bubbles of words next to their heads as the character spoke.

Key Contributions

• End-to-End Product Development: Collaborated directly with founders to translate product vision into technical architecture, owning features from early prototyping through production.

• AI-Powered Character Experiences: Helped bring interactive 3D characters to life, combining real-time gameplay with conversational AI and persistent character memory.

• Scalable Unity Architecture: Architected a service-oriented, platform-abstracted mobile client that cleanly separated core gameplay logic from platform-specific systems.

• Cross-Platform Integrations: Built modular integrations for audio, authentication and device permissions, improving maintainability and supporting future platform expansion.

Impact

Helped turn an ambitious AI product vision into a functional, extensible mobile experience, laying the technical foundation for interactive characters that feel more personal.