It’s not just AI that is going to fundamentally change our relationship with interactive animated characters. It’s also the fact that more and more, such characters will exist in our physical world.
Mixed and extended reality will move those characters off the screen and into the room. This means that these characters will be able to make eye contact with us.
And I’m not talking here about breaking the fourth wall. A character on a screen can look at us, but it can only do so by looking at everybody.
In contrast, a future XR interactive animated character will be able to look you in the eye while ignoring me, or vice versa. This will have a powerful social effect, the way there is a powerful effect when a puppy decides to like one of us better than the other.
An entire new interaction language will start to evolve to understand what this means. And that will only be the beginning.