RESERVE
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Often that person will pick a pen or a keyboard, and write the answer to that question. We all love to tell stories, we love to write them down, but right now that's all most of us can do. Write.
We want to give people another option. We make it easy for anyone to take their favorite world, and animate the next page of the book like a tv show, or a movie. Using AI-driven characters and crafted 3d environments we are creating a platform for “storyspaces”, allowing users to tell visual stories in the worlds they love as easily as putting a pen to paper.
Whenere is a place where fans of IPs can come together, enjoy their favorite works, mod them, share them, distribute them and even potentially monetize them. Using our platform, users can mod stories and worlds, share their work, view the work of others and form communities. This allows both creators and consumers to come together and participate in a new kind of story experience.
A Marketplace of immersive environments of high visual quality, clothing, props, etc, will provide the building blocks of sets.
In Whenere, we have trained AI NPCs on period-appropriate knowledge, manners and speech patterns to create individuals that truly feel like the characters in the book. They act out the story by conversing with one another, by following a word-for-word script, or leaning on their AI-ness and following a script based on prompts.
The player is able to step into scenes and interact with the characters and develop relationships with them. Unlike “choose your adventure” or branching narratives, the player’s interactions will not change the course of the story. We leave that up to the storyteller!
Imagine you are a fan of the original Pride and Prejudice novel, and then became a fan of the famous 1995 BBC adaptation starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. You want to make your own adaptation and share it to the world. But this is almost impossible. The skills, team and budget are completely out of your reach, and so you can only dream of what you might do. Currently your best options are writing fanfiction or engaging in cosplay.
Now imagine easy tools that enable you to realize your creative ideas. From initial text through to sharing video, and even making a living creating what you love.
This is what Whenere allows you to do.
For our first offering, we have chosen Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, America's Favorite Book. While Pride and Prejudice is immensely popular (39 million books sold, 17 film and TV adaptations), it has not been successfully adapted into the digital universe in a way that preserves its overall spirit.
It is ideal for several reasons other than we love it:
We “distill” original IP (initially, globally popular books in the public domain) into categorized data sets that can be used to inform conversational AI characters, to act out the books from whence they came. That data includes all the dialog in the book broken down line by line including who says what to whom, and in what emotional state and with what stage direction. We translate all exposition into dialog, much as a screenwriter does.
We provide the tools and source material for viewers to enjoy and creators to craft their own works using an easy UI.
Whenere address two distinct types of user: “Viewers” and “Creators”.
Viewers
A Whenere viewer is like an avid reader of a favored author, always looking for new books to enjoy, for like-minded readers to talk to, and for related works to enjoy. Like Harry Potter fans always hoping for a new book or Stephen King fans delving into the latest horror story, the Whenere viewer will be an active participant in the fandom around a favorite work but not making their own content.
Creators
A Whenere creator is like a fanfiction writer. They too are avid fans, but they take the experience one step further and create their own scenarios. The creator is the user who dreams up the alternative scenario of Mr. Darcy and Mary, for example, and passionately tell it to its conclusion.
Creators will:
We consider Roblox, as well as Fortnite's UEFN and Minecraft, to be the best comparable products to Whenere as they serve to make game development accessible to non-professionals.
While very different businesses, they are great examples of a platforms that dramatically reduce the barrier to entry to making video games, as Whenere does with visual storytelling.
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Note: All Roblox revenue is generated by its users spending on UGC worlds created by other users.
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A good comp for the video streaming aspect of Whenere the is niche service Crunchyroll. It is a subscription streaming service that focuses on anime, with over 1,300 series and movies. It offers a large selection of titles, including simulcasts of shows that air in Japan on the same day, and also features dubbed content from other services.
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The comparable products above give us confidence in Whenere’s potential, but have have a very different market. Our target audience for Whenere includes creators and fans.
We find creators on such platforms as Episode, Wattpad, PocketFM and Webtoons are passionate and using tools that are “simple” compared to making games and movies.
Early fans will come from both Jane Austen communities and the enormous, and underserved, Romance market, Bridgerton fans in particular.
Romance Novels
Romance novels are the highest-earning genre of fiction, generating over $1.44 billion in revenue each year. In the 12 months ending May 2023, romance novel sales increased by 52% compared to the previous year, and more than doubled from 2021. This growth has been attributed to the interests of younger readers, who discover romance novels through social media and streaming TV. Romance readers are also more likely to try new authors than readers of other genres.
We provide the tools for writers to craft their own story experiences (both interactive and via video) AND a place to publish them. Instead of publishing through existing digital stores, which we believe dilutes our proposition, we will distribute via our own marketplace. This allows us to maintain a strong relationship with our customers and community, as well as capturing 90+% of revenue.
While we are still exploring many options, Whenere will likely feature two revenue streams: a Marketplace with digital goods and subscription tiers. Future revenue streams could include advertising, in-story sponsorships and fees for supporting/building offerings for premium IP holders.
Our Marketplace sells both core storyspaces and virtual goods that support them. For example we sell both the core storyspace of Pride and Prejudice and associated asset from fanfiction stories to characters, clothing, hair, accessories, furniture and more. Initially these goods are developed in-house, but our goal is for this to grow much further with creator content of all kinds in a UGC pipeline.
Example: Creator content in the Pride and Prejudice storyspace. The user has searched under Pride and Prejudice for stories about Mr. Darcy and Anne de Bourgh.
We are exploring processes to create our furniture and other “set dressing” via photogrammetry. As we develop the tool path and marketplace we will connect photogrammetry experts to furniture owners such as antique dealers and museums. A revenue sharing model will allow such collaborations to profit.
Each item will be tagged and have metadata that will not only make it discoverable in the Marketplace, but also provide in-game information that can be used by the characters. A character that is created to have an interest in English porcelain will notice such items in a room and be able to discuss them with the player.
The money we raise will be used to develop a “vertical slice” of Whenere focused on proving out the core pillars: emotionally engaging AI actors, an easy to use story editor and creating environments and props via photogrammetry.
This will include a fully built out “Longbourn” manor house, home of the Bennet family with interactive props (furniture and so forth)
We will use this prototype version as a proof of concept in our next round of funding.
After the current prototype development phase we will continue developing both product and platform; building the apps and support structure to serve real users.
We have been working on Longbourn (the code name for the Pride & Prejudice first playable) since the Autumn of 2023. We have reached the following status:
Environment: The setting, an English country house and garden, has two developed locations.
Character AIs: based on ethically-sourced data we have created eight distinct characters using Inworld AI’s system. We are continuing to test them in conversation and refine them, often working hand in hand with Inworld AI as they make pre-release features available to us.
Avatars: The avatars are currently MetaHumans, most still wearing modern clothes until we can raise enough money to develop a character system and clothing assets. Shockingly, there are NO Regency assets in the Epic Marketplace. Not ONE bonnet.
Voices are from ElevenLabs.
Systems: the story of the original novel has been broken down into a spreadsheet containing all relevant information about characters, settings, dialog, plot events, and so on. In this spreadsheet the user may currently change the dialog, emotional state, stage direction, scene location, with more to come.
Early work is underway on behavior and animation systems.
We invite you to join us on our journey and to bring this opportunity with Whenere to the people who will love it most, its community.
