Geenee AR: Enabling creators and brands to deploy AI-powered characters in AR

Geenee integrates Inworld to uplevel their augmented reality avatars

Overview

Geenee AR is a web-based, no-code platform that unleashes the power of augmented reality (AR) for brands, influencers, and creatives. With Geenee, creators can easily design and publish immersive and interactive AR experiences that can be activated in the real world – helping their users engage their audience in a whole new way. Geenee prides itself on offering scalable and rapidly deployable AR experiences that bring a brand's unique story to life.

When they wanted to add the ability to have immersive interactions with their AR avatars, they considered popular large language model APIs for creating AI characters but found Inworld AI’s no-code Studio was the ideal solution for their platform and customers because it had all the features they needed for creating engaging characters out-of-the-box. 

• Platforms: Web & Mobile
• Type of Tech: Augmented reality (AR)
• Integration type: No-code platform
• Customers: Brands, influencers, creatives
• Location: Los Angeles, California, United States

Challenge

Geenee AR’s Head of Partnerships, Elena De Sossa, knew that their game changing AR experiences improved customer engagement and sales. But she also recognized that Geenee’s experiences lacked the human-like engagement that would make them truly immersive. 

After ChatGPT was released in the fall, Elena began strategizing how to transform their AR experiences with dynamic interactions in order to help brands communicate more meaningfully and personally with their audiences. 

Use cases Geenee envisioned

• AR clothing try-ons with an AI sales associate
• Brand mascots interaction
• AMAs with singers or actors when they release a new album or movie
• Promos and tutorials for new products
• Influencer brand activations
• Onboarding or training use cases
• Educational use cases such as interviewing historical figures
• And more!

Elena and her team started exploring recent advancements in generative AI like ChatGPT with the goal of integrating their AR product with the latest wave of AI tools on the market. 

“When you think about the future of augmented reality, AI is an indispensable component of it,” she explained.

One problem: their AR tool is no-code for a reason. Geenee’s core customers aren’t highly technical. That meant that any solution they implemented had to have a similarly simple user experience. They couldn’t expect their users to become prompt engineers. They either needed a purpose-built solution they could integrate – or they would need to create a no-code solution themselves.

Context

Providing always-on, personalized, and scalable customer engagement has long been a challenge for brands, influencers, and creatives. Marketing and customer success teams struggle to stand out in a noisy digital space that demands, not only that brands engage their users more, but that they engage them in more meaningful and personalized ways. Geenee AR positions their experiences as one way brands can accomplish scalable and always-on engagement – but their product lacked the personalized interactions that AI characters could provide.  

Elena was excited by the type of interactive stories and experiences brands would be able to build with Geenee’s platform using AI. But the idea of building their own system for developing AI characters, starting with a large language model API, felt overwhelming. Plus, integrating AI technology would be a time-consuming and resource intensive process that would delay their other business and product deadlines. They wanted to find a way to add AI characters to improve customer engagement and storytelling without all the work. 

Using a large language model API would mean hiring

Geenee didn’t want to have to hire machine learning experts and prompt engineers just to add AI characters to their platform. Doing so would take resources away from their planned product roadmap.

Scalability and reliability

Scalability is important for brands – but Geenee wasn’t sure how they would scale AI characters to meet customer demands on their own by using an LLM via API. They also worried about outages and how to provide a reliable experience.  

Cost and time-to-market

The total cost of integrating an LLM API (usage costs, hardware costs, staffing time, additional hires) would be prohibitively expensive and mean that they wouldn’t have that feature available for many months. 

Elena wasn’t sure what to do – until she found Inworld.

Why Inworld?

“We were thrilled to come across this solution that was ready to go,” Elena said. Elena met Inworld at a conference and it felt like a match made in heaven. She was impressed with the comprehensiveness of Inworld’s product. While Inworld’s ability to create detailed personas and characters was already impressive, what really caught her attention was how easy it would be to deploy them online through Geenee's AR portal.

“We knew when we came across their technology, that if we could pair them with some of the avatars that we brought into reality with Geenee we would really be cooking with gas,” she explained. 

What sold Geenee AR on Inworld

• A no-code studio that would be easy for Geenee’s clients to use
• Additional safety guardrails for clients concerned about brand safety
• Easy integration into their product
• Real-time latency for seamless AR experiences
• 4th wall and context for characters and brand ambassadors
• Event triggers to program some responses and direct the interaction 
• Full integration with ReadyPlayerMe avatars to make it easier to deploy
• Inworld’s support for Geenee’s large enterprise clients
• Out-of-the-box usage (ex. character voices, animations, and expressions)
• Cost-efficiency – for both Geenee AR and its customers

All that and she wouldn’t have to hire a single machine learning developer! 

Inworld also made it easy for Geenee to integrate into their platform, providing them support in the process. “Not only are we really impressed with the technology that they developed, but we really enjoyed collaborating with them as well,” said Elena.

Impact

Geenee's recent integration with Inworld has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for brands looking to harness the power of AI characters. “You can really develop real relationships now with AR characters,” she explained. That has huge benefits for brands trying to connect with their customers. 

The benefits for brands

• Personalized interactions
• Improved engagement metrics
• Increased sales
• Rapid user base growth
• Lower costs to engage and support customers

“Adding an AI brain to our avatars is something that any brand can take advantage of now,” she said. Elena is excited that what she first envisioned just a few months ago is now possible for Geenee’s customers. And she can’t wait to see what they create!

Want to integrate Inworld, too?

Get started today in our studio or connect with our Partnerships team to learn more about integrating Inworld into your product.