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 …
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Interesting to actually be able to experience this kind of AI tech that we’ve heard will replace polygons eventually but calling it interactive is somewhat misleading. I thought I’d be able to knock things over and interact with objects but all you can do it walk around. There’s definitely some kind of seeding as the scenes are always similar and there’s only so far you can walk before it resets you back.
I tried to walk up some steps that appeared to be out of bounds and everything started turning yellow. I tried to back down and turn around and somehow got slowly teleported to a different place in the scene.