Here comes the Holodeck - the AI breakthrough allows you to play a game from a picture

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “This would make a great multiplayer map” (and I can’t have been the only one), then your time has come.

New AI-generated world models allow users to generate playable worlds from image prompts. So you can create a platformer based at your local soft play center or a sci-fi shooter based at your local gym. We even saw Google recreate Doom in real time using AI image generation.

Okay, it’s early days, but if you’re curious, examples have been popping up in the last few months – including a nifty walkthrough of a diffusion world model in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

AI could generate a game level in real time

Have you always wanted to play Counter-Strike on a neural network? These videos show people playing (with keyboard and mouse) in 💎 DIAMOND’s diffusion world model, which is trained to simulate the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.💻 Download and play it yourself → image .twitter. com/8MsXbOppQKOctober 11, 2024

The new technology relies on a much faster image pipeline than was previously possible, potentially allowing players to walk through worlds in real time as they are generated.

Of course, this requires a lot of processing power, so you’ll probably need a sturdy device to enjoy it, and there are plenty of flaws too. A lack of tailored maps would likely mean inferior textures and bizarre geometry (expect more than a few dead ends in corridors) and currently the model can only capture the image of the world for a short time.

That means you could walk through a door, turn around and the door would be gone. On the other hand, this could lead to a dream-like impermanence, where one approaches more of an Inception-like inability of not knowing how you got to the moment you’re in, but seeing firsthand how this collapses in on itself.

It’s an intriguing concept and it will be interesting to see if developers start incorporating diffusion world models into their projects.

Here comes the Holodeck – the AI breakthrough allows you to play a game from a picture

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