＂AI play＂ will win？ ＂Game Spring Festival Evening＂ is coming

The following article comes from science and technology innovation board Daily by Zheng Yuanfang.

Science and technology innovation board Daily.

Science and technology innovation board Daily is sponsored by the director of Shanghai Newspaper Group and produced by Cailian. Focusing on emerging industries and capital is an important public opinion frontier for science and technology innovation board, emerging industries and capital, covering a new generation of information technology, semiconductors, biomedicine, new energy, new materials, funds, etc., and providing product system services such as media, data, cities and investment banks.

The annual "Game Spring Festival Evening" is coming again. According to official website, Game Developers Conference 2024 will be held in San Francisco from March 18th to 22nd.

As the largest and most influential industry summit in the global game industry, this GDC takes "AI" as the key word, and Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, Meta, Adobe, Epic, Unity, Roblox, Tencent, Netease and Pico will participate in related conference activities.

In addition to the 16 AI theme summits, game companies and AI technology and tool providers will also participate in the forum to show the latest progress of AI-enabled games.

Looking back at the GDC conference in 2023, AI has become the biggest key word. Microsoft, Ubisoft, Roblox, Tencent, etc. all shared AI’s innovations in game production/operation, including reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and creating new gameplay.

However, at that time, the application of AI in games was still at a relatively early stage, and most of them generated tools such as text, pictures and codes for AI, such as Tencent AI Lab’s self-developed 3D game scene automatic generation solution; Ubisoft AI tool Ghostwriter can automatically generate NPC scripts, write game stories and create task content. Unity realizes the transformation of text input into game asset creation through AIGC technology.

From the theme of this year’s GDC key conference, we can see that AI has penetrated into more links in the game field, and the results are quite remarkable. This year’s GDC conference will hold hundreds of conferences, covering AI, VR, AR, audio, vision, programming, narrative, product management and many other topics.

On the one hand, AI has penetrated into more production links, including improving the frame rate/clarity of the picture, reviewing the game content, training and teaching, etc. On the other hand, AI has also penetrated into more game categories, such as MMO, social interaction and fighting.

It is worth noting that the GTC conference in NVIDIA will be held together with GDC on March 18th, and games will also be one of the focus categories of this conference. NVIDIA official website shows that in the field of games, this GTC conference will explore how to create virtual characters and worlds with the help of generative AI and path tracking.

With the development of AI technology for a year, several AI tools that are expected to deeply empower games have been born recently.

For example, Sora, which caused a "huge earthquake" in the industry, pointed out that Sora showed many "interesting emerging functions" during large-scale training, including analog digital world.

In this function demonstration, OpenAI uses the game as an example: the researchers provide Sora with a prompt that includes "Minecraft" (My World game), and Sora can render HUD, high-fidelity rendering of the world and game dynamics that are very similar to My World game, and at the same time control the player’s role.

Figure | Screenshot of the demonstration video of |“Sora Edition My World

In addition, DUSt3R, an AI 3D tool that recently appeared on the trend list of GitHub platform, can generate 3D scene reconstruction from simple photos or change the original production process without any prior information of camera calibration or viewpoint posture.

Guotai Junan pointed out that 3D production is an important part of game production, especially for large-scale games such as the open world. Due to the high production threshold, it still needs more related costs such as modeling and art. If the rapid modeling technology like DUSt3R is mature, it is expected to significantly improve efficiency in this link, or it will increase the supply of high-quality games and large-scale games such as the open world.

"2024 will be the year of robot, the year of game AI and the year of simulation." Jim Fan, a senior research scientist in NVIDIA, judged this before.

Last year’s GDC conference has given a surprising answer to the "AI+ game". Let’s wait and see how it will perform this year.

Original title: "AI play" will win? "Game Spring Festival Evening" strikes "

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