Exclusive TrailblaXR interview: REPLIKANT on the future of interactive digital experiences

LUC SCHURGERS | CTO | REPLIKANT

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Award winner, creative entrepreneur and tech visionary, Luc Schurgers’ career bridges real-time graphics, visual comedy, and cutting-edge digital production. After earning qualifications in Applied Sciences and a Master’s in Computer Animation he launched into the world of viral marketing and advertising, directing commercials and founding studios like Minivegas and PetGorilla to transform bold ideas into immersive, tech-driven campaigns. Today, he is pushing the boundaries of animation and digital content with REPLIKANT, an AI-powered 3D virtual production platform that makes high-quality character creation, digital humans, and virtual environments accessible to all creators. Let’s get chatting!

The latest updates to REPLIKANT’s Chat platform show a shift toward more adaptive, personality-driven interactions – what’s been the biggest challenge in creating AI agents that respond with both emotional nuance and real-time reliability?
The biggest challenge involves balancing the spontaneity and creative freedom with the technical requirements of AI-driven 3D animation. The objective is to ensure that our AI agents not only respond with emotional nuance but also do so in a consistent and technically reliable way in real-time. This requires a careful combination of standardized assets, performance optimization across various hardware, and an intuitive user interface that allows creators to maintain control without needing deep technical expertise.

When can we look forward to the browser-based version?
A browser-based version is a key part of our plan to expand accessibility. While our initial focus has been on the Steam Early Access and standalone versions, the goal is to allow users to seamlessly access and interact with REPLIKANT from any browser and any device. You will have a digital companion across the gamut that can educate, support or where you can have full interactive experiences with. We have a working version that we are testing internally, but haven’t launched it publicly yet. This will most likely be around October so stay tuned to our official channels and updates page for the latest information on the release date.

You’ve recently teamed up with Boosteroid – what made it the right fit, and how does it offer something a bit different compared to platforms like GeForce NOW, Steam, or the Epic Games Store?
It’s quite similar to GeForce now actually. Our partnership with Boosteroid is designed to make the full REPLIKANT experience more accessible to a broader audience. While platforms like Steam and Epic are focused on local game distribution, Boosteroid and GeForce NOW offer a cloud-gaming environment. This aligns with our goal of reaching a wide user-base by offering a streamlined experience with lower hardware requirements, complementing our existing presence on other platforms.

In what ways do you envisage users to create interactive experiences for virtual and extended reality?
We are currently working on a native iOS and MacOS version and a Linux version. This will both bolster consumer as well as developer accessibility as an AppStore download is so easy. While Linux will allow developers to build on top of our tech with API integrations and the ability to deploy into custom websites.

Once all these platforms are completed we will start looking into augmented and virtual reality so that users can create rich, multi-sensory experiences for virtual and extended reality. The vision is to empower creators to build immersive worlds where AI characters can trigger AI-generated images, display personal photos, play music, and engage in event-driven storytelling.

Luc Schurgers | CTO | REPLIKANT

Our platform will provide the tools for creators to develop not just conversations, but dynamic and evolving narratives with multiple AI personalities, allowing for truly interactive and persistent virtual worlds. I’m personally very excited about this, but that field is in constant development so we need to pick our hardware partners for this wisely.

How do these three pillars – Editor, Chat and Cloud Storage come together to serve your long-term vision of autonomous digital actors in persistent, interactive worlds?
The three pillars form the foundation of our long-term vision. The Editor is where creators define characters, environments, and narratives. The Chat platform is the user-facing interface where these creations are brought to life with real-time, emotionally nuanced interactions. Cloud Storage serves as the central repository for all media and configurations, providing a portable “creative toolkit”. This synergy enables the creation of autonomous digital actors that can access persistent memory across sessions and use stored media to create richer interactions.

Can you speak about customers where REPLIKANT is deployed in different or unique ways?
We have seen innovative deployments beyond our core sectors. For example, educational institutions are using REPLIKANT to build curriculum-aligned AI tutors that combine personalized instruction with interactive visuals and sound. Businesses are also exploring our platform to create custom, branded AI assistants for customer support and internal training, leveraging the multi-modal capabilities of our characters to enhance user engagement. We’re currently working with a well known social media platform to integrate an educational campaign directly into their live streams. 

REPLIKANT’s Chat characters are currently quite stylised – however, with your team’s deep experience in realism, do you envision them evolving into more lifelike digital humans? And if so, which industries do you think will benefit most from that shift?
When it comes to our characters, we’re all about giving you the right tools for the job. We have a very elaborate character designer within our toolset. 

Our team has indeed  a deep background in creating high-fidelity 3D characters, but we also know that making photorealistic digital humans that move and perform believably is a really complicated process. Even with great off-the-shelf tools like Epic’s MetaHuman, it’s a huge undertaking.

Stylized characters are a lot more forgiving with animation and require less compute power, which is why we’ve focused on them first. While we do support higher-quality characters, we think it’s better to roll them out later as the technology and our platform mature. In fact, we’re first adding support for lower-quality and even more stylized VRM characters (Virtual Reality Model is a 3D avatar format), which are super popular with VTubers and the like.

Industries that will benefit most
This focus on different levels of character support will open up new opportunities across several key industries.

• Live Entertainment: The ability to create realistic digital humans will be a game-changer for film, virtual concerts, and interactive storytelling. 
• Customer Service and Enterprise: We’re moving beyond basic chatbots. Lifelike AI assistants can handle complex customer interactions with more empathy and trust. They can serve as virtual reps available 24/7, providing consistent, high-quality support that frees up human staff to focus on more complex tasks. 
• Healthcare and Education: In these fields, building trust and providing emotional support is critical. Realistic digital humans can serve as believable tutors, virtual therapists, or medical assistants. They can offer personalized support and information in a comforting way, making learning and accessing care more effective and engaging for a wider audience.

Can you talk about some of the most innovative projects you’re working on, or have worked on?
My work has consistently focused on merging technology with storytelling, and this is showcased in the projects on my personal website in the technology section, lucschurgers.com. 

An early and foundational project was for the Welsh broadcaster S4C, where we created real-time interactive network idents. This was an innovative use of technology that allowed for a dynamic, ever-changing visual identity that was a precursor to our current work and we made a custom game engine for this.

Building on that experience, I’ve developed projects for major brands that were not just about creating a campaign but building a two-way conversation. For CNN, we built an interactive “Ecosphere” that used WebGL to create a digital world people could explore and engage with. Similarly, for Adidas’s UEFA Finals campaign, we used real-time graphics to create an immersive, interactive experience that connected with fans in a way that went beyond traditional advertising. I worked on a wide range of projects from a fully interactive club for Heineken to a real-time travel documentary for Skype and a totally crazy campaign that launched the rebrand of Old Spice just to name a few, but real-time interaction and engagement has always been something I’m really interested in, so building on this experience I wanted to create a platform that had this element worked in from a foundational level.

Now, with REPLIKANT, we’re taking that same spirit of innovation and making it accessible to everyone. We are currently working on projects that enable an “ensemble cast”, where multiple AI characters can interact with each other and the user in a shared, persistent world. We are also integrating AI “webcam” or image vision capabilities, allowing our characters to analyze and discuss images or videos in real-time. This opens up new possibilities for interactive storytelling and educational applications. We’re proud of the music videos and short-form content that creators are already producing with our platform, showcasing how these tools are democratizing 3D animation.

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Is there anything else you’d like to share with your audience?
I want to emphasize that our core philosophy is to empower creators. We see AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as a powerful tool to accelerate it. We believe in removing technical burdens and not in prompt solutions for everything. We have designed our platform to be welcoming to both beginners and professionals, offering an “easy mode” for quick content creation while providing the underlying tools for advanced control and customization. We invite everyone to join us in shaping the future of interactive digital experiences.

Additional key details:

• Platform Features: Our platform is designed for multi-modal interactions, incorporating sound effects, music, animations, and AI-generated visuals to create dynamic and immersive experiences.
• Creator Tools: We offer a suite of creative tools for building and customizing AI characters, environments, and narratives.
• Community: We have a growing community of creators and users. We encourage you to join our Discord channel to connect with other creators and provide feedback. Join our Steam Community.
• Updates: You can find the latest updates, news, and features on our website’s updates page.

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