Whenere is an immersive AI character-driven storytelling platform that will transform how you experience the story worlds of favorite books. Watch AI characters act out the story, interact with them, or create and share your own versions of the story, characters, and settings.
We are currently working on an early prototype and raising funds. Help us build Whenere!
Contact us at socials@whenere.world
Whenere was founded by long time creative partners: futurist and award-winning author Neal Stephenson and noted game industry veteran Karen Laur.
Karen Laur
FOUNDER & CEO
After stints as restaurateur to the D.C. punk scene, high-end wallpaper designer, and horse-drawn carriage driver, Karen Laur became Employee #17 at Valve Games. Joining as a texture artist, she focused particular attention on developing a coherent visual world for the game Half-Life. She left Valve to make a game about horses, a dream not yet realized, and worked in the Bay Area for Forterra and There.com delving deeply into the development of virtual worlds and “serious” games.
She stated working with Neal in 2010 when she joined his transmedia startup, Subutai, as art director and producer. As a Creative Director on Neal’s team at at Magic Leap, she conceived the idea for Baby Goats, an augmented reality application that populated the user’s environment with realistic animated baby goats. Since then, she has worked as an Executive Producer with Stephenson on a series of projects in the realm of interactive media and virtual production.
Neal Stephenson
FOUNDER
Neal Stephenson has been programming computers since 1974. He developed a particular fascination with using them to make pictures in the late 1970s when someone made the mistake of giving him access to a vector graphics terminal. He acquired a Macintosh as soon as that device hit the market and programmed it to generate imaginary fractal landforms as part of a solo project to make a role-playing game. In due course this led him into an ambitious computer graphics project in the late 1980s that culminated in the writing of Snow Crash and the fateful coining of the term Metaverse. In all, he has written or co-written some 20 books, mostly of science or historical fiction.
In parallel with that he has pursued a career in technology, working at Blue Origin, Intellectual Ventures Labs, and Magic Leap. In 2022 he co-founded Lamina 1 of which he is now chairman.