Vio Zhu is a software engineer turned VJ and multimedia artist. As a VJ, she is passionate about merging natural aesthetics with digital visual production, creating visually compelling audio-reactive works. Her art has been curated by LVMH and Public Visuals, and she performed for DJ Rebolledo's Japan tour. As a multimedia artist, she collaborates with a wide range of creatives, from traditional Japanese musicians and techno DJs to club owners to neuroscience professors. Her goal is to integrate scientific knowledge, evoke novel emotions, and inspire self-reflection through immersive, aesthetically driven interactive experiences.

10/28 RR technical challenges

In Rising River, we created dynamic responses for AI characters by integrating the player’s typed answers in real time. This means that until a player submits their response, we can’t proceed to the next step in the dialogue or storyline, as each response is generated on the spot based on their input.

Additionally, to make the whole gaming experience more immersive, AI responses aren’t just displayed as text — they're voiced by characters, which involves an extra step of sending the generated text to a speech API. This extra step can sometimes slow things down, especially if the response text is long, causing a delay after the player submits an answer.

To address this latency, we intentionally designed the game experience to keep players engaged and exploring the virtual space, reducing any feeling of "waiting" for a response. We also implemented extensive prefetching. As soon as we gather enough information from the player’s responses to anticipate a future AI reply, we send the request to the AI in advance, well before that part of the game is reached. This allows us to have responses ready and minimizes delays when the player arrives at the next game step. We also iterated on the complicated logic in our prompt system, reducing dependencies to make the AI's response time as fast as possible. By using these three strategies, we’ve worked to create a smooth, immersive game experience without noticeable delays.