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Odysseyis a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke. is developing an AI-powered tool that can convert text or an image into a 3D rendering.
The tool named “Explorer” is somewhat similar to the one in the word world models Recently demonstrated by DeepMind, World Labsand the beginning of Israel Descartes. Given a title like “A Japanese garden with rich, green foliage,” Explorer can create an interactive, real-time scene.
Odyssey claims its tool is “specifically tuned” to create photorealistic scenes. This is largely a result of the startup’s technical approach; The artificial intelligence powering Explorer has been trained on real-world scenarios caught with the company’s specially designed, 360-degree, backpack-mounted camera system.
Any scene created by Explorer can be loaded into creative tools like Unreal Engine, Blender and Adobe After Effects and manually edited, Odyssey says. How? Explorer uses decades of gauss splats that are capable of reconstructing real scenes. Gaussian splats are widely supported in computer graphics tools.
“Initially, we’re excited to see the level of 3D detail and fidelity that Explorer can achieve and its potential for use in live-action film, hyper-real gaming and new forms of entertainment,” Odyssey wrote in its article. blog post. “In previous research, generative world motion, while all in 3D, offers the exciting promise of allowing artists to create and manipulate motion in new and more realistic ways while providing fine-tuned control that is difficult to replicate in generative video models.”
Odyssey acknowledges that the Explorer has some limitations today. The tool takes an average of 10 minutes to generate scenes, for example, and its scenes are relatively low-resolution — and not free of distracting visual artifacts.
But the company says it has already deployed Explorer to production houses such as Garden Studios in the UK and a “growing group” of independent artists. Those looking to test drive the Explorer can head over to Odyssey’s blog.
Developers may have mixed feelings about tools like Explorer, especially those in the video game and film industries.
A the end A Wired study found that game studios like Activision Blizzard, which has laid off large numbers of workers, are using artificial intelligence to cut corners, increase productivity and compensate for attrition. And 2024 to learn A report commissioned by the Animation Guild, a union representing Hollywood animators and cartoonists, estimates that more than 100,000 film, television and animation jobs in the United States will be disrupted by artificial intelligence by 2026.
But Odyssey says it’s committed to working with — not replacing — creative professionals. To that end, the company announced Wednesday that Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Disney Animation Studios, has joined its board of directors and invested in Odyssey.
“General world models are the newest and most underexplored fundamental frontier in all of artificial intelligence,” Odyssey wrote. “We aspire to worlds that construct themselves, indistinguishable from reality, where new stories are born and remixed, where human and machine intelligence interact for fun or purpose. If all we end up with are better and better movies or games, we’ll fail.”
