[HN Gopher] WorldGen - Text to Immersive 3D Worlds
___________________________________________________________________
WorldGen - Text to Immersive 3D Worlds
Author : smusamashah
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-11-22 21:20 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.meta.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.meta.com)
| copx wrote:
| First steps towards the Holodeck.
| boriskourt wrote:
| The paper is quite good [0] there are some interesting details on
| tackling individual meshes.
|
| (couldn't cleanup the link at all sorry)
|
| [0]: https://scontent-
| lhr6-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.2365-6/586830145_...
| ranyume wrote:
| I'd call this 3DAssetGen. It's not a world model and doesn't
| generate a world at all. Standard sweat-and-blood powered world
| building puts this to shame, even low-effort world building with
| canned assets (see rpg maker games).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's not really a world no. It generates only a small square by
| the looks of it. And a world built out of squares will be
| annoying.
|
| Still, it's a first effort. I do think AI can really help with
| world creation, which I think is one of the biggest barriers to
| the metaverse. When you see how much time and money it costs to
| create a small island world called GTA..
| ranyume wrote:
| Last time I checked, the metaverse was all about people
| collaborating in the making of a shared world, and we already
| have this. Examples include minecraft and vrchat, both of
| which are very popular metaverses. I don't see how not having
| bot content generation is a barrier?
|
| Then, let's say people are allowed to participate in a
| metaverse in which they have the ability to generate content
| with prompts. Does this mean they're only able to build
| things the model allows or supports? That seems very limiting
| for a metaverse.
| huevosabio wrote:
| This is cool, but it seems much more like a 3d asset generation
| than the scene generation like World Labs.
| echelon wrote:
| WorldLabs' Marble creates a Gaussian Splat scene. It's a
| totally different technology.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| My first thought was the comment in the thread from the other day
| about Zork and hooking up an AI image generator to that.
|
| But, it looks like WorldGen has that slightly soulless art style
| they used for that Meta Zuckverse VR thing they tried for a
| while.
| serf wrote:
| >My first thought was the comment in the thread from the other
| day about Zork and hooking up an AI image generator to that.
|
| I have done this in the early GPT days with 'Tales of Maj'eyal'
| and to a lesser extent RimWorld.
|
| It works great for games that have huge compendiums of world
| lore , bestiaries, etc.
| anthk wrote:
| With a roguelike you would just map tiles to 3D terrain and
| objects.
| anthk wrote:
| Instead of Zork, I would try with All Thing Devours, or
| Spiritwrak. There are libre games since forever and they are
| designed in Inform6 with all the source code being available,
| and the compiler and the English library it's free too and it's
| a really structured language for literal ingames objects mapped
| to programming (OOP) objects.
| jsheard wrote:
| > fully navigable, interactive 3D worlds that you can actually
| walk around and explore.
|
| You can explore, but is there a single interesting thing to find?
| Games have been playing with procgen forever and if we've learned
| anything it's that procgen systems are the least interesting part
| of any game which has them, they're just set-dressing for the
| content that _isn 't_ procgen.
|
| https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...
| schmichael wrote:
| It's a fun demo but they never go into buildings, the buildings
| all have similar size, the towns have similar layouts, there's
| numerous visual inconsistencies, and the towns don't really make
| sense. It generates stylistically similar boxes, puts them on a
| grid, and lets you wander the spaces between?
|
| I know progress happens in incremental steps, but this seems like
| quite the baby step from other world gen demos unless I'm missing
| something.
| serf wrote:
| >It's a fun demo but they never go into buildings, the
| buildings all have similar size, the towns have similar
| layouts, there's numerous visual inconsistencies, and the towns
| don't really make sense.
|
| that's 95% of existing video games. How many doors actually
| work in a game like Cyberpunk?
|
| on a different note , when do us mere mortals get to play with
| a worldgen engine? Google/meta/tencent have shown them off for
| awhile but without any real feasible way for a nobody to
| partake; are they that far away from actually being good?
| jaccola wrote:
| There are a bunch of different approaches. Many are very
| expensive to run. You can play with the World Labs one, their
| approach is cheap to explore once generated (vs an approach
| that generates frame by frame).
|
| The quality is currently not great and they are very hard to
| steer / work with in any meaningful way. You will see
| companies using the same demo scenes repeatedly because
| that's the one that looked cool and worked well.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| I would think the argument for this is that it would enable
| and facilitate more advanced environments.
|
| There's also plenty of games with fully explorable
| environments, I think it's more of a scale and utility
| consideration. I can't think of what use I'd have for
| exploring an office complex in GTA other than to hear
| Rockstar's parodical office banter. But Morrowind had reason
| for it to exist in most contexts.
|
| Other games have intrinsically explorable interiors like NMS,
| and Enshrouded. Elden Ring was pretty open in this regard as
| well. And Zelda. I'm sure there are many others. TES doesn't
| fall into this due to the way interiors are structured which
| is a door teleports you to an interior level, ostensibly to
| save on poly budget, which again, concerning scale is an
| important consideration in both terms of meaning and effort
| in-context.
|
| This doesn't seem to be doing much to build upon that, I
| think we could procedurally scatter empty shell buildings
| with low-mid assets already with a pretty decent degree of
| efficiency?
| jaccola wrote:
| This is potentially a lot more useful in creation pipelines
| than other demos (e.g. World Labs) if it uses explicit assets
| rather than a more implicit representation (gaussians are
| pretty explicit but not in the way we are used to working with
| in games etc...).
|
| I do think Meta has the tech to easily match other radiance
| field based generation methods, they publish many foundational
| papers in this space and have Hyperscape.
|
| So I'd view this as an interesting orthogonal direction to
| explore!
| schmichael wrote:
| Thanks! That's some nuance I absolutely missed
| thwarted wrote:
| > _they never go into buildings, the buildings all have similar
| size, the towns have similar layouts, there's numerous visual
| inconsistencies, and the towns don't really make sense_
|
| These AI generated towns sure do seem to have strict building
| and civic codes. Everything on a grid, height limits, equal
| spacing between all buildings. The local historical society
| really has a tight grip on neighborhood character.
|
| From the article:
|
| > _It would also be sound, with different areas connected in
| such a way to allow characters to roam freely without getting
| stuck._
|
| Very unrealistic.
|
| One of the interesting things about mostly-open world game
| environments, like GTA or Cyberpunk, is the "designed"
| messiness and the limits that result in dead ends. You poke at
| someplace and end up at a locked door (a texture that looks
| like a door but you can't interact with) that says there's
| _absolutely_ nothing interesting beyond where you 're at. No
| chance to get stuck in a dead end is boring; when every path
| leads to something interesting, there's no "exploration".
| trollbridge wrote:
| Sounds like the AI accidentally implemented NIMBY style
| zoning.
| tritip wrote:
| Every environment appears to be a miniature golf course version
| of reality. Was this a deliberate choice?
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Having the technical knowhow to have an ai generate 3d models,
| but then generatively compositing those assets together into
| environments in a way that would have seemed overly simplistic to
| gamedevs 3 decades ago...
| willyxdjazz wrote:
| It's funny, I don't know if I see a use for it, and this feeling
| surprises me. Just as procedural maps bore me, I feel this will
| be similar in any use case I can think of. What I like is the
| perceived care behind every action. After the initial "wow" of
| the care put into that research, I don't think it will end up
| being a "wow" that scales--I don't know if I'm making myself
| clear.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| It's definitely a step forward from that 'Minecraft world' gen
| tech demo that had no persistence of vision.
|
| I can see it being useful for isolated Unity developers with a
| concept and limited art ability. Currently they would be likely
| limited to pixel games.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I loathe how meta.com makes my back button gray out in my
| browser. Stop trying to force me to stay, it is obnoxious.
| meander_water wrote:
| It's funny, I clicked the link to the demo, but it 404s, then I
| tried googling Worldgen, and it turns out someone else has built
| the same thing in May and called it Worldgen as well. Looks like
| it does better at realistic 3D scenes compared to this.
|
| [0] https://worldgen.github.io/index.html
| jsheard wrote:
| That's pretty far from the same thing, their technique is a 2D
| image in a trenchcoat. It instantly falls apart if you move
| more than a foot or so from the original camera position.
| Alex04 wrote:
| Thanks for the info.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| It's weird, houses are almost all tall and too narrow.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I can see this working as a randomly generated map for some quick
| game, like the Worms games did in 2D.
|
| But, having things feel strongly on a grid kind of ruins the
| feel. It's rare for every building to be isolated like that. I am
| guessing they had trouble producing neighboring buildings that
| looked like they could logically share a common wall or alleyway.
| mrdependable wrote:
| These look a lot like World of Warcraft. I wonder how much of
| their training data they got from it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-11-22 23:00 UTC)