Google Maps Street View and similar tools allow you to virtually navigate real-world locations from the ground, even if you can’t interact with what you see. A new tool from AI startup Odyssey offers an experience in AI-generated locations that you can interact with, and it’s produced in almost real-time.
Odyssey calls it “interactive video,” an AI-powered world that reacts to your actions. You can visit the AI-made spaces, using your keyboard to explore a range of forests, stores, parking lots, and buildings that shift as you move.
The system guesses and shows new parts of the video so fast that it feels like a blend of a video game and a weird dream. The interactive video utilizes what Odyssey calls a “world model,” which simulates a visual environment in response to your actions.
Unlike a traditional video game, where every texture, collision, and scenario is crafted ahead of time, Odyssey’s AI comes up with what you see on the fly. Every step you take prompts the AI to render a new frame, one that tries to make sense of your motion in context. It’s essentially a video that responds like a video game.
Behind the scenes, the system generates a new video frame roughly every 40 milliseconds. That’s fast enough to make the experience feel fluid, even if it occasionally stutters or lags. The goal isn’t photorealism yet.
Odyssey is more interested in responsiveness. The idea is to have AI generate the story of your exploration as you move around, rather than relying on pre-written narratives.
Uncanny AI
You can see a clip of some of my exploration above. The low-resolution visuals combined with the ambient soundtrack made it seem like I was in a low-budget avant-garde film, or possibly about to be murdered and my case given to some quirky but brilliant European detective. The textures are soft and slightly blurry. Walls sometimes ripple. I even walked on water at one point.
But it is real, in the way an early 90s video game’s graphics are realistic. It’s like the terrible videos early cellphones shot, or how games like Doom and Quake look to my eyes after 30 years. Then again, Doom once looked like the future, and I took plenty of terrible videos on a flip phone just because I could and because I didn’t care that each pixel was the size of a pea. Odyssey is still glitchy, but it is impressive, at least enough to prompt more than a few people to respond on social media, accusing the company of lying about what they had created.
Odyssey is well aware that they still have work to do. The company itself describes the experience as “a glitchy dream.” Or maybe the comparison should be a live improv show where you get called up on stage, as opposed to taking part in a polished and rehearsed play.
There are still many technical, ethical, and basic functionality questions to be answered, but assuming they are addressed to people’s satisfaction, you can extrapolate a lot of interesting uses for Odyssey. With enough training data and fine-tuning, you could produce personalized experiences that adapt to your interests and style.
Imagine exploring that previously mentioned murder mystery where the characters react to your suspicions. Or a history lesson where Julius Caesar comments on your terrible toga-tying technique.
Then again, it could also mean advertisements where the product placement literally walks over to you to strike up a chat. Wobbly visuals, inconsistent physics, and a lack of story logic are significant hurdles, but this could be the shape of all kinds of entertainment.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
