This time we would like to introduce Makoto Matsutake, a Human Agent Architect in charge of developing the core components that control Ludens' Virtual Human Agent. He was originally a well-known Flash engineer. We asked him how he joined Couger and what he does now.

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First of all, please tell us about your background.

-First encounter with Flash in Okinawa-

I first encountered Flash when I was in high school. I had touched websites before that, but when I tried using Flash, which offers an overwhelmingly wide range of expression, I still remember how it excited me and how I thought, "This is interesting!”. Later, I joined a company in Okinawa, but Tokyo was in the golden age of Flash, and I knew I had to go to Tokyo too. I got acquainted engineers who were making cool Flash by sending messages on social media and also gathered the latest information.

-Moving to Tokyo as a freelancer at the age of 26-

I moved to Tokyo at the age of 26, when my Flash-related connections began to grow. I felt that I could do some freelance work based on the connections I made through my blog, where I wrote about Flash bugs and other noteworthy topics.

-Encounter with Mr. Ishii-

While working freelance in Tokyo, I met Mr. Ishii (CEO of Couger) for the first time through an acquaintance. From there, I joined his game development project as a helper and worked with him for the first time.

After that, Rachel was born as a 3D character for an AI simulator, and in 2017, the Ludens project was launched to run Rachel as a Virtual Human Agent, and I formally joined Couger.

“The most difficult and most interesting thing are humans, why don't we create that together?”

You went from the world of games to AI, but there are not many people who have moved from games to AI, are there?

Yes, that's true. People in the game industry have a strong interest in interesting things, but in most cases, their goal is to make games, so it seems that it is rare for them to make the leap from the game industry to AI.

In my case, I originally like interaction systems. I like to create pleasant user interfaces, although Virtual Human Agent is not very involved in that. In some of my previous projects, I have created characters and reactions that don't do what people tell them to do.

For example, if someone said something nasty, they would make a disgusted face for a moment, but would quickly return to their idle smile. If they continued to say more and more nasty things, it was interesting to create reactions that would turn grumpy. In that project, it was okay for it to act like that for a short period of time during the event.