Video game Evaluationa fast-paced team shooter, has recently become a testing ground for a promising modern field of artificial intelligence research. According to a researcher familiar with the company’s efforts who spoke on condition of anonymity, game developers at Riot Games (a Tencent subsidiary) are using native 3D artificial intelligence models to prototype modern characters, scenes and storylines.
While many AI models can generate text, images and video, Tencent Hunyuan (混元 or “first mix”) the model family can create 3D objects and interactive scenes. The source says that Tencent’s models are also used by the creators of another Tencent game, GKARTand also by some third-party developers. Tencent declined to comment.
“The gaming industry requires a lot of investment,” says the source. “Before, it took a month to design a character. Now you can just type in the text and Hunyuan can give you four options to choose from in 60 seconds.”
This news is an early sign that models capable of understanding and reproducing the physical world could become a standard element of game design. In addition to generating game content, these models could also enable more advanced virtual and augmented reality and lend a hand robots learn modern activities.
“Currently, we are dealing with a real explosion of research into 3D vision,” he says Alexander Raistrickgraduate of Princeton University working on novel approaches to generating 3D content. “There are a lot of killer applications: content creation, self-driving, and a whole host of issues related to augmented reality.”
Raistrick adds that video games are an obvious application for 3D AI models. “Deriving 3D meshes [a standard way of representing 3D objects] this is the typical bread and butter of game development,” he says.
However, as in other original fields, the utilize of artificial intelligence to create video games is controversial. Concerns about job losses due to artificial intelligence are high. Some developers say games should be marked when they contain content created by artificial intelligence. Others say it’s too tardy: the technology is already ubiquitous in the industry.
Tencent fired HunyuanWorld 1.0model generating interactive scenes, in July. I tested this a few months ago, examining a scene that looked like it was part of a Lego movie – a valley of colorful bricks disappearing into the distance. Lately I’ve been playing around with a more basic model, the Hunyuan 3D, which can conjure up 3D objects. I used it to generate some very nice custom 3D printed Dungeons & Dragons characters. In October, Tencent released a modern version of HunyuanWorld that allows users to upload videos to generate 3D scenes.