Minecraft remains remarkably popular roughly a decade after its release, thanks to a unique combination of quirky gameplay and open-world building possibilities.
An imitation called OasisReleased last month, it captures much of the flavor of the original game with a notable and strange twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an artificial intelligence model that imagines each frame.
Oasis was built by an Israeli artificial intelligence startup called rule out in collaboration with recordeda company that designs custom silicon, to demonstrate the potential of optimized hardware to power transformer-based AI algorithms.
Oasis uses a transformative AI model, similar to the one that powers a large language model, only trained, apparently, on endless examples of people playing Minecraft, to devise each new video frame in response to the previous one and to user input, such as clicks. or mouse movements. Oasis is similar to a video generation model like Sora except that a user can control its output.
You can play Oasis. online free, and it’s fascinating and surreal to explore. In addition to housing strange artifacts, such as deformed cattle and stairs that lead nowhere, the game has a striking quality, similar to that of Inception. Because each frame is generated based on what the AI model imagines should come after the frame it currently sees, the game world is never completely stable and will gladly shift and morph with a little nudge. If you look too closely at a texture, for example, when you look up again, the world of blocks in front of you may be completely different from the one you saw last time.
It is also possible to upload your own image for Oasis to work with. I tried to add a photo of my cat, Leona, and the game turned her into a beautiful blocky landscape (sadly she’s not a feline character in the game, but oh well…).
Oasis has become a viral hit among people. exploring ways to get your AI engine to hallucinate new environments. Sometimes you can even be tricked into teleporting you to a dark lunar-like landscape. The end from Minecraft. Tellingly, this generative AI project is not entirely original, but appears to be a strange imitation of the most popular game in the world (it was trained on an open source Minecraft). data set from OpenAI).
“People are trying to teleport to different worlds and run at full speed,” says Robert Wachen, COO of Etched. “It’s one of the main reasons it went viral.”
The AI approach taken with Oasis is too inconsistent and uncontrollable to be useful in a conventional game, says Julian Togeliuscomputer science professor at New York University. Generative AI has future potential to control characters in games and perhaps generate scenes or worlds, he says, but it’s still early days. “It’s a very interesting and impressive technology, but at the moment it’s an answer to the search for a question,” says Togelius.
Frank Lantzgame designer and chair of the game design department at New York University, says Oasis seems to be stuck in a kind of uncanny valley that prevents it from being truly fun to play. But it suggests that an enterprising young game designer might well find a way to turn that game into one that people love. “This is obviously cool and interesting,” he says.