Minecraft remains incredibly popular roughly a decade after its release, thanks to its unique combination of quirky gameplay and open-world building capabilities.
A raise has been announced Oasisreleased last month, it captures most of the flavor of the original game with an unusual and strange twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an artificial intelligence model that invents every frame.
Oasis was built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in cooperation with Etchedcustom silicon design company to demonstrate the potential of hardware optimized for power transformer-based AI algorithms.
Oasis uses a transformer AI model, similar to the one that runs a gigantic language model – apparently trained only on countless examples of people playing Minecraft, to come up with each up-to-date video frame in response to the previous one and to user input such as clicks or mouse movements . Oasis is similar to a video generating model like Sora, except that the user can control its output.
You can play Oasis on the Internet for free, and exploring it is both fascinating and surreal. Besides containing bizarre artifacts such as misshapen farm animals and stairs leading to nowhere, the game has an eerie, Inception-like quality to it. Because each frame is generated based on what the AI model thinks should come after the frame it’s currently seeing, the game world is never completely stable and will happily shift and transform with a little nudge. For example, if you look too closely at a texture, when you look up again, the blocky world in front of you may be completely different from the last time you saw it.
It is also possible to upload your own image to work with Oasis. I tried to add a picture of my cat Leona and the game turned her into a stunning blocky landscape (unfortunately she is not a cat character in the game, but hey…).
Oasis became a viral hit among people discovering ways Down get AI engine hallucinate up-to-date environments. Sometimes you can even trick him and teleport him to a dim lunar landscape End Minecraft. It’s telling that this generative AI project isn’t entirely original, but rather seems like a bizarre knockoff of the world’s most popular game (it was trained on the open-source Minecraft platform data set with OpenAI).
“People are trying to teleport to different worlds and run fast,” says Robert Wachen, chief operating officer at Etched. “That’s one of the main reasons it went viral.”
Oasis’ AI approach is too inconsistent and uncontrolled to be useful in a conventional game, says Julian Togeliusprofessor of computer science at Fresh York University. Generative AI has future potential for controlling characters in games and perhaps generating scenes or worlds, he says, but it’s still early. “It’s a very interesting and impressive technology, but it’s an answer to the question at the moment,” Togelius says.
Frank Lantzgame designer and director of game design at Fresh York University, says Oasis seems trapped in some kind of uncanny valley that prevents real play. But it suggests that an enterprising adolescent game designer could find a way to turn this game into a game people love. “It’s obviously cool and interesting,” he says.