Real-world applications of Generative AI in Virtual Reality

Jeffrey Boopathy
Generative AI
Published in
7 min readMay 5, 2023

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The term Generative AI must be popping up everywhere. From people writing blogs like Chat GPT use cases in various industries like law, healthcare, and marketing to writing blogs on Generative AI in the same industries. Though a vast number of people appear to be understanding the context of Generative AI there are still businesses and professionals trying to understand its meaning. So I have made it as simple as possible and given a small explanation with an example. I hope that helps.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new content, such as images, text, music, or even videos. It works by analyzing and learning from existing data and then using that knowledge to generate new, original content that resembles the input data. This is different from other types of AI that mainly focus on tasks like classification, recommendation, or prediction.

Image Source

One popular example of Generative AI is a language model, like ChatGPT. These models are trained on vast amounts of text data and learn the patterns, structures, and nuances of language. Once trained, they can generate new sentences or paragraphs that appear to be written by a human.

This technology has many applications, such as writing emails, generating news articles, and even creating entire novels. Similarly, Generative AI can be used to create new images, music, or 3D models, opening up a world of possibilities for creativity and innovation.

Does GAI in VR actually work?

Alright, let’s chat about how Generative AI is helping make Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse vision come true, with a big focus on Virtual Reality. You know how these days people love to hype up tech stuff? Because of that, it’s important to figure out if Generative AI in VR is actually doing what it’s supposed to, or if it’s just another overblown idea. A lot of what you see on social media is still being tested or just a prototype, after all.

But good news! It turns out that Generative AI is really making a difference in VR. Later in this post, we’ll check out some cool examples where people use simple prompts to make 3D things and even get objects to move around (yeah, physics!) in 3D software. So, if you’re a VR developer, you should definitely think about using this tech to speed up your work.

There are tons of chances to team up with AI development companies and build your own custom Generative AI tools that’ll make your projects even better.

One of the cool concepts I found is this infinicity. Here’s a small abstract from the paper they released,

“Toward infinite-scale 3D city synthesis, we propose a novel framework, InfiniCity, which constructs and renders an unconstrainedly large and 3D-grounded environment from random noises. InfiniCity decomposes the seemingly impractical task into three feasible modules, taking advantage of both 2D and 3D data. First, an infinite-pixel image synthesis module generates arbitrary-scale 2D maps from the bird’s-eye view. Next, an octree-based voxel completion module lifts the generated 2D map to 3D octrees. Finally, a voxel-based neural rendering module texturizes the voxels and renders 2D images. InfiniCity can thus synthesize arbitrary-scale and traversable 3D city environments, and allow flexible and interactive editing from users. We quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework.”

Real-world applications of GAI in VR

Creating Virtual Worlds Using Roblox Generative AI

Roblox, a leading platform for user-generated 3D experiences, is leveraging Generative AI to revolutionize content creation for its 58.8 million daily users worldwide. The company aims to augment its Roblox Studio, making it faster and easier for creators to develop immersive experiences, while also enabling every user to become a creator themselves.

With Generative AI’s ability to learn underlying patterns and structures, it can dramatically accelerate content creation across various forms of media, such as images, audio, code, text, and 3D models.

By integrating Generative AI tools into the Roblox platform, creators can overcome limitations in their skill sets, allowing them to focus on their strengths while the AI takes care of the rest.

For instance, a creator proficient in coding but inexperienced in 3D modeling can still bring their ideas to life with minimal artistic input. Furthermore, Roblox envisions a future where creators can develop integrated 3D objects with built-in behavior, making it easier to create interactive content through simple statements.

Roblox is committed to enabling an ecosystem where users, AI developers, and the AI community can collaborate seamlessly, fostering a robust marketplace for generative AI-powered content and tools. As part of this vision, the company is working on rolling out tests for generative AI materials and code completion tools in the coming weeks.

However, Roblox also emphasizes the importance of implementing generative AI responsibly and ethically, ensuring a safe and civil platform for its diverse community.

Simplifying VR Game Creation using Unity AI

Unity Software Inc., the company behind the popular video game development platform, is looking to create a generative AI marketplace for game developers, as announced by CEO John Riccitiello.

This marketplace aims to streamline the game development process by providing access to AI-generated assets, such as characters and sound effects. With generative AI technology, developers can instantly create content, reducing the resources and time spent on traditional asset creation.

One of the most significant aspects of generative AI is its potential to offer personalized scenarios in video games based on player input. Riccitiello envisions a future where game characters have motivation, personality, and objectives generated by AI, resulting in dialogues that do not require human writers.

While no specific timeline for the marketplace launch has been provided, Unity has already introduced a program granting developers early access to its upcoming AI offerings.

Generative AI tools, such as image creators DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, have been available for some time, and newer products are emerging that create videos and video game content based on text prompts. A teaser video from Unity demonstrates the potential of this technology, showcasing how developers can simply input text commands to generate game assets or code automatically.

By integrating generative AI tools into its platform, Unity aims to revolutionize the game development process, making it more efficient and accessible for creators.

Stable Diffusion in a VR Mission

Scottie Fox, a visionary developer, has combined AI image generation and virtual reality to create Stable Diffusion VR, an immersive experience that brings AI-generated images into a 360° space.

Utilizing consumer PC hardware, this groundbreaking project transforms virtual reality by immersing users in a constantly evolving dreamworld powered by the Stable Diffusion image generator. Although still in the experimental phase, the project has already shown promising results and potential applications across various industries.

One of the primary challenges in developing Stable Diffusion VR was to efficiently process the computationally heavy task of real-time rendering in a seamless and continuous manner.

To overcome this hurdle, Scottie broke the entire process into smaller pieces, which are then diffused and queued to be processed in the background. This innovative approach not only saves time by not having to render the entire environment at once but also results in a smooth and immersive experience for the user.

Looking to the future, Stable Diffusion VR has the potential to transform gaming and various other industries, with applications ranging from crime scene reconstruction to personalized therapeutic experiences. Scottie envisions a hybrid game genre where companies combine their existing technologies with AI-generated content, offering fluid and dynamic gaming environments.

The potential of AI in gaming extends to bug testing, personalized escape room experiences, and evolving horror or RPG monsters tailored to each game. As Stable Diffusion VR continues to develop and refine its technology, the project promises to revolutionize the way we experience virtual reality.

Unity+OpenAI+Elevan Labs results in this

ChatGPT’s entry into the realm of Virtual Reality marks a significant step forward in the evolution of immersive storytelling. With this groundbreaking integration, users can now interact with virtual characters who can respond intelligently to questions without relying on predefined scripts.

As technology continues to advance, the possibilities for creating rich, interactive, and dynamic virtual worlds are virtually limitless, offering a deeply engaging experience for gamers and non-gamers alike.

Refer: Source

What do these applications mean?

You might be wondering, like, what’s the big deal with these real-world applications of Generative AI? Well, the end goal is pretty straightforward: it can help businesses create simulations, VR worlds, or 3D environments way faster.

The only catch is that you’ve gotta be super clear about what you actually want, ’cause the AI is gonna give you what you ask for based on your prompts. And, to be honest, a lot of these AI tools don’t really let you edit the generated content easily, especially when it comes to VR spaces. But, hey, that’s bound to change sooner or later, so we’ve got that to look forward to!

In conclusion,

The world of Generative AI is opening up some seriously cool opportunities for VR and 3D environments. As these technologies continue to advance, we’ll see more immersive and responsive experiences, making our virtual worlds even more lifelike. It’s clear that the creative possibilities are pretty much endless, but we’ve gotta be specific about what we want from these AI tools.

While there might be some limitations now, like a lack of flexibility in editing generated content, it’s only a matter of time before these AI-powered VR spaces become even more amazing. So, hold onto your (virtual) hats, folks — the future of VR with Generative AI is shaping up to be an exciting ride!

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