AI companies have recently been experimenting with interactive, AI-generated worlds. There’s an AI-generated version of Quake. An AI-generated Minecraft. Google DeepMind is also building a team to develop models that “simulate the world.” Now, an AI startup backed by Pixar cofounder Edwin Catmull is trying to put its own spin on the idea – something it calls “interactive video,” which it’s letting people experience as part of a research preview that’s available today.
The startup, called Odyssey, describes interactive video on its website as “video you can both watch and interact with, imagined entirely by AI in real-time.” The idea is that you can engage with the video in some way – think a first-person video game but in environments that actually look like the real world instead of one made of polygons. Odyssey hypes it up to be an “early version of the Holodeck,” though it acknowledges that “the experience today feels like exploring a glitchy dream – raw, unstable, but undeniably new.”
In motion, Odyssey’s interactive videos feel like walking through a blurry version of Google Street View. You can walk around the startup’s real-time generated worlds using the WASD keys as tho …
Read the full story at The Verge.