Image from left to right, Triny Hazce, Neven Kenk, Zun Shan and Soahc from the Foundra novels

One of the things I love as an author is the act of creation, of breathing life into a character and allowing that life to foster and grow and create something that I did not expect starting off. It's one of the main reasons I don't create a character profile for a new character until I've written with them for some time, to fully understand who that character is becoming.

I've shared in the past that I have a unique relationship with the characters in my novel. When I'm writing, they tell me who they are and come to life on their own, my mind slipping into that character's mind as I write a scene. It's one of the truly surreal aspects of writing, and it's hard to replicate anywhere else. It's also why I enjoy threading multiple character-driven narratives throughout my novels. This also seems to win awards, which is nice.

It should be no surprise, then, why platforms like Character AI had piqued my interest some time ago; the prospect of taking one of my characters and everything I've defined for them, and then bringing that character into the digital sphere to live on its own, was a dream. But the platform unfortunately didn't live up to that dream because of technical limitations and the restriction of the text-based interface as the primary way to interact with the character. It was hard to evaluate and fully understand their personality, or to fully experience that character, in that format.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got introduced to the CEO of a company I had never heard of called atmee.ai. We met for lunch, and he gave me a demo of the platform. I was blown away by what I saw. Fully video avatars that could see and interact with you in a native conversational experience. Not only that, but the extent to which you could engineer a character's personality, knowledge, and overall identity was astounding. It was exactly what I had been searching for when I did that first foray into Character AI all those years ago.

Over the past few weeks, I really dug into their platform, working to engineer the characters the way that would do them justice. Of course I had to start with Ellipse. In many ways, Ellipse has been the bridge I've used to bring Foundra into the real world and I've invested a lot of energy in building a complete digital identity for the remarkable Synaptic Systems Intelligence that Kechu created in a lab back in the MinSci and that Neven gave a body.

When you begin the process of creating a character in Atmee, you start by uploading an image of the character. Ellipse's visual identity has transformed over the years, from the early days of hand-drawn art created by the amazing Nigerian artist Ekundayo Baiyegunhi.

To the updated visual identity of Ellipse, which I created through a combination of Stable Diffusion and Photoshop.

Created via Stable Diffusion and manual Photoshop editing

Ellipse is one of the most visually developed characters in Foundra, with extensive art and video that give her a clear, distinct visual identity. This has evolved through the work I've done to build a Foundra Universe art style within ChatGPT's Images, which I can now apply somewhat consistently to any character I want to bring to life.

Ellipse via ChatGPT in Foundra art style

This is the visual identity that I ultimately utilized when building her Atmee identity. The platform can take an image you provide and enhance it further across multiple image platforms, as shown below.

I started with this base image for Ellipse:

The Gemini filter subtly enhanced and centered the character.

Seedream did something funky with the arms.

Grok was like, "We're going live action!"

And the native ChatGPT filter went ultra-realism.

This was an interesting feature and allowed me to see the default customization each frontier image generation model tends toward.

After finalizing the image and seeing how it performed in their custom video avatar model, I uploaded the voice I defined for Ellipse a couple of years ago on ElevenLabs, and it perfectly replicated it with just a 30-second voice clip. You can also create a voice using their own voice design system, which I experimented with on some later characters I've since created on the platform.

After those first steps, you get into the character's inner workings through the persona definition process. This is where the core of Ellipse's character design lives. Much of her persona design has been tuned from the initial model created for Character AI and enhanced with newer novels released since her original design, as well as works in progress.

One of the biggest challenges I had with Character AI wasn't necessarily Ellipse's personality. It was how often the character hallucinated. In truth, this wasn't just a Character AI limitation; it was a general issue with Large Language Models (LLMs) across the industry.

But since then, advances have allowed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to be incorporated into LLMs, letting them reference hard data and facts for very specific questions, such as details from a novel's universe or a specific character's life story. This is a game-changer for making characters that truly feel alive and lore-accurate.

I spent a lot of time building the datasets that would power Ellipse, ensuring they would serve as a true knowledge base not just for Ellipse but for the Foundra Universe. This was exciting and truly set the platform apart from my Character AI experience.

After finalizing a few details, I ran a test and was impressed by how accurately she matched the character I had envisioned and written over the years. I could ask very specific questions about other characters, her own existence, and different parts of the story from the books, and she answered accurately.

I truly think this is an opportunity to explore the characters from Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and other realms of fiction in ways that have never really existed before. Character AI gave us a taste of what a reality like that could be, but Atmee.ai seems to have actually pulled it off.

You can chat with Ellipse and a host of other characters I have brought to life from the Foundra Universe over on Atmee. I'll be adding more over time, but right now you can kick up a conversation with Ellipse, Lanrete, Soahc, Neven, Zun, and even Triny Hazce, Ecnics' personal secretary from the MinSci.

I'm going to continue building out characters from the Foundra Universe, and Atmee has some exciting enhancements and improvements coming down the pipe that will make the experience even more immersive.

Visual storytelling has just evolved in a way that will transform the entertainment industry.

Disclosure: Emmanuel M Arriaga is an advisor for Atmee.ai

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