Last time we took a look at components that improve current iterations of the holodeck idea from Star Trek, namely the Holo-Tile omnidirectional treadmill. This week brings news of a significant breakthrough in generative text-to-video at OpenAI.
Text-to-video has been something of a holy grail for generative AI. Text-to-image pictures are pretty good. Companies from Adobe to OpenAI and seemingly everyone in between have created some awesome products that will generate bespoke images never before seen with a few taps on the keyboard and a click of the mouse. I’ve been using Microsoft Designer’s output here for months, which is based on OpenAI’s DALL-E system.
But text-to-video requires considerably greater output and processing power. Instead of generating one static image, the system has to create enough pictures to offer seamless motion and stitch them together. Most of the eye-popping stuff that has been demoed to the public, such as Google’s Lumiere, looks great but is generally limited to five seconds or so of output.
Now, along comes OpenAI’s Sora. Sora, which is the Japanese word for “sky,” by the way, offers hyper-realistic text-to-video output that lasts up to a minute long. In a word, it is revolutionary.
Internet speculation abounds that Sora may have been trained on a video game engine, such as Unreal Engine 5. That has led to additional pondering as to the future of video games. If you don’t have to download a preprogrammed world, one in which all the pixels have been painstakingly arranged by coders working over a span of years, but have an AI system create scenes and environments on the fly for you . . . it would completely revolutionize gaming. Perhaps no two experiences would ever be completely the same in such a game.
Perhaps it would be like . . . the holodeck.
Today I’m happy to announce Steam & Aether Books 1-5: Complete Series Box Set. It’s available for a low debut price.
Thank you for the special price gift, Jaxon! The preordered boxset landed in my Kindle App at midnight sharp, Spain time. 🥰