Korean Gaming Giant Krafton Introduces AI-Powered Virtual Beings for New Metaverse Platform
Korean video game developer Krafton has debuted hyperrealistic virtual humans to use within the digital worlds of the metaverse. As seen in the demo video above, the new characters leverage AI to move and interact with humans as virtual friends and game show hosts.
Krafton Virtual Beings
Krafton, best known for competitive online games like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, augmented the Unreal engine with its own AI to generate virtual human characters and their realistic skin, hair, and body movements. They even squint in reaction to bright lights. The characters are built from motion-capture videos that the graphics technology can use to reconstruct a digital skeleton that moves like a human body. The virtual flesh layered over it then uses text-to-speech, speech-to-text and voice-to-face tech to imitate real people. Krafton wants to deploy the characters on its new metaverse platform, called “Interactive Virtual World,” one of several digital spaces rolling out from major tech companies worldwide.
“Krafton’s virtual human demo showcases the sort of high-end content that can be realized with hyper-realism technology,” creative director Josh Seokjin Shin said. “This demo represents the initial steps we’re taking to realize an incredible and interactive virtual world (metaverse). In the meantime, we will continue introducing more advanced versions of virtual humans and content based on the belief in the infinite scalability of such technologies.”
Metaverse Race
The metaverse and virtual beings to populate the digital space have become one of the hottest conversational AI and virtual reality trends. The platforms and tech developers working on aspects of it don’t lack for investors. Startups like Hour One, Supertone, Resemble AI, Veritone, and DeepBrain are all grabbing cash and clients. And platforms like Nvidia, Meta, Baidu in China, and the Jio-financed Two Platforms metaverse all have potential virtual being customer bases. LG recently announced that its virtual spokesperson would be recording a music album, following in CoCo Hub’s virtual footsteps. On Russian TV, Sber has even deployed a virtual show host. Gaming companies like Krafton are an obvious vehicle to bring more interactive versions of the virtual characters to virtual spaces.
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