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Woburn-based gaming startup 8D World Inc. had them all fooled.
With Ensemble Studios founder Rick Goodman on the management team, and a website displaying fantastical scenes and Chinese-language characters, stealthy 8D World last year looked like Age of Empires for the Asian market. Turns out, they’re teaching English as a foreign language — with a beta product launched this month.
“We’re deceptive, shall we say,” quipped founder Alex Wang, who conceived the idea while heading up sales in the Asia Pacific region for Burlington-based Emptoris Inc.
The 8D World product is a fantastical online virtual world called Wiz World, designed to let players interact in spoken English with computer-generated characters that correct their word choice and pronunciation. With Wiz World, Wang hopes to find a market in Asia for a product developed using Boston’s unique mix of expertise in gaming, artificial intelligence and education.
Wiz World’s “language robots” are backed with language recognition and pronunciation assessment technologies developed by Daben Liu, formerly a senior scientist on translation projects at BBN Technologies. The company’s creative content director, Jodie Waldesbuhl, is a former Brookline Public Schools teacher who has consulted on English language acquisition projects on both sides of the Pacific.
Now available in China, Wiz World will expand across Asia and later to other global regions, Wang said. The fantasy setting was chosen for a cross-cultural appeal.
Voice-over-Internet chat may come later, but for now the experience is computer-generated, to assure parents it is safe for children to use.
In parts of Asia, most children already learn English, said Simmons College Education Department chair Paul Abraham — but without immersive training, few achieve conversational capability.
“I think this is the next generation and it makes a lot of sense to go this route,” he said. “Given the international population that’s going to be making use of this kind of online training, I think it really makes sense to go into the Second Life model.”
Wiz World isn’t the first virtual language training application, said Jimmy Tong, a doctoral candidate working in Boston University’s psycholinguistics lab. The U.S. military’s Tactical Language Training System, developed at the University of Southern California, teaches soldiers Iraqi languages and cultural norms in a virtual setting.
Language-learning video games enjoyed a surge in the mid-1990s, Tong said, but have fallen off since. One recent entrant is Zon, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese, developed at the University of Michigan.
Wang said 8D World has raised $7 million in a Series A round closed early last year with Boston investors Spark Capital and a Chinese venture firm, Gobi Partners. Spark’s Alex Finkelstein holds a board seat, as does Gobi’s Lawrence Tse.
The company hopes to produce revenue through subscriptions, microtransactions and sponsorships. For example, users will appreciate learning how to order at McDonald’s or Starbucks in English, Wang said.
How to incorporate American fast-food franchises into a setting that includes dragons, wizards and talking trees? Not a problem, Wang said. “You can make a fantastical version of McDonald’s.”
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