Gaming giant Ubisoft has released a preview of its latest AI game prototype that gives non-player characters (NPCs) impressive abilities. The developer’s new NEO NPC was announced Tuesday at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Ubisoft still has a long way to go before its NEO NPCs are used in games, but it will change the way players interact with non-playable characters (NPCs), providing a richer experience and encouraging the adoption and advancement of artificial intelligence in games. He said he would promote it.
Conversations with in-game characters feel more realistic!
Introducing our research project, NEO NPC. A new kind of NPC that uses generative AI to actually talk to you! Find out how our team of writers and developers come together in this exciting experiment:… pic.twitter.com/FvvyvXWZKu
— Ubisoft (@Ubisoft) March 19, 2024
In the GDC demo, players interacted with the NEO NPC AI, which Ubisoft said displayed “unprecedented cognitive and interaction abilities,” including emotions, memory, situational awareness, and decision-making.
Ubisoft, the studio behind Assassin’s Creed, Rainbox Six, and Far Cry, says these advancements use voice chat technology. NPCs can use generative AI to share ideas, ask questions, and help players plan future actions.
“I’m used to building characters’ backstories, their hopes and dreams, the experiences that shape their personalities, and I’m used to using all that information to write dialogue,” Ubisoft narrative director Virginie Mosser said in a statement. “He said. “It’s very different, but for the first time in my life, I can have a conversation with a character I’ve created. “It’s something I’ve dreamed of since I was young.”
Ubisoft said NEO NPC was created through a partnership with chipmaker Nvidia and Inworld AI. The company said it will use Nvidia’s Audio2Face technology, part of the ACE family, to create realistic facial movements.
Last summer, Silicon Valley-based Inworld AI raised $50 million in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Stanford University, Samsung Next, strategic investor Microsoft’s M12 Fund, Eric Schmidt’s First Spark Ventures, and LG Technology Ventures also participated.
In addition to interactive dialogue, Ubisoft said Inworld AI’s technology will allow Ubisoft’s writers to develop detailed backgrounds, lore, and dialogue for each NPC.
“The way we’ve worked on this project has always been with players and developers in mind,” Guillemette Picard, Ubisoft’s senior vice president of production technology, said in a statement. “We recognize that developers and their creativity must still drive our projects. Generative AI is only valuable if it is valuable to developers.”
Ubisoft did not immediately respond to this. detoxification Request for comment.
Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Midjourney were released last year, game studios have been exploring ways to leverage the technology. Studios joining Ubisoft in the AI race include Blizzard Entertainment, Square Enix, and Microsoft.
At the Consumer Electronics Show last January, Ubisoft announced that the game studio had tapped tech giant Nvidia to develop more responsive, conversational characters using Nvidia’s growing suite of generative AI technologies.
“Generative AI provides unprecedented creative opportunities for our teams and players,” Picard said in a separate statement. “It’s when they discover the value that games have that we begin to see their true potential to change the way games are made and played.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
