Meet NARI, Your Personal CGI Tutor

HP Park ’21’s new project NARI is an artificial intelligence chatbot with a fully animated 2D and 3D visual model. Graphics courtesy of HP Park

From Siri to Alexa to the nameless Google Home assistant, personal voice assistants are now seen (and heard) in homes all around the world. At home in Seoul, South Korea, Visual Arts Concentration member and 3D graphics enthusiast HP Park ’21 is currently working on a smart assistant of his own: a chatbot and 3D graphics tutor called the Narrative Assistant for Rendering Inquiry (NARI).

As the founder of the new 3D computer-generated imagery (CGI) club, Park often receives simple and repetitive questions from students on 3D effects and operations. With the student body scattered across the globe during this term of remote learning, Park was inspired to create a virtual assistant that could replace him in helping students learn 3D graphics software.

“Since I am no longer on campus to teach other people in-person, I thought to myself, ‘What if I were to make a virtual representation of myself?’” Park said. 

Park began working on NARI after he returned to Korea. He explained, “I started development for an AI chatbot to have it recognize speech contexts and provide appropriate responses. You will be able to ask NARI a question about 3D, and it will provide useful tips and ‘tutorial cards’ corresponding to that question.”

Unlike most personal assistants, NARI will have a fully animated visual model in addition to typical conversational capabilities, with the assistant’s face animated in 2D and its body rendered in 3D.

Park aims for NARI to feel as realistic as possible with facial expressions and changes in stance when the chatbot is listening to an audio input. He hopes that having a character associated with the virtual assistant will set NARI apart from other AI companions.

In the process of modeling NARI, Park has encountered roadblocks ranging from issues in shading to difficulties in meshing 2D and 3D graphics together. He described combining the two conflicting styles of 2D and 3D art as the biggest learning curve he faced, saying the process has been both “a challenge and an adventure.” Park revealed that his solution to mistakes in NARI’s anatomy model is concealing imperfections with animated clothing, such as a sweatshirt that features his own personal logo.

Working in 3D combines art, data, and other facets that can be used to translate what’s seen in reality or create something better. Although Park focuses on the functionality of the chatbot tutor too, he sees it as being more design-centered.  He said, “[CGI] is often like acting, but you do it piece-by-piece on a puppet that reflects some part of yourself you want to express. That’s [the] ultimate control.”  

While designing NARI’s functionalities, Park kept in mind the challenges he faced when he first learned 3D graphics. According to Park, NARI would provide more straightforward answers than the results from search engines. Instead of needing to browse through long documents or tutorials to find answers to simple questions, students would be able to save time by using NARI instead. Park aspires to make  NARI available for public use in 3D programming education and accessible on all operating systems on devices. Of his long-term goals, Park said, “One day there could be one-to-one scale interactive digital guides in public buildings.”

Although Pixar movies first sparked his love for 3D art, Park cites the Academy Award-winning Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse and Studio Ghibli’s animated films as his biggest inspirations for this project. Park was inspired by how film and animes have pushed traditional boundaries of art with combinations of 2D comic-like features with 3D elements and spaces.

As 3D graphics have been Park’s passion for many years, he hopes his current work can help the Choate community gain interest in 3D art as well. 

NARI, he said, “feels like a way for me to share a little something that I have devoted my life to learning.”

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