Roblox has announced a beta tool which enables users to create interactive 3D models from text prompts, an upgrade to its existing 3D asset generation tool revealed last year. The feature was announced in a blog post.
The announcement follows widespread investor excitement over the debut of Google’s Genie tool for world generation, which prompted a sharp stock price drops for Roblox along with other major game publishers including Nintendo and Take-Two.
The tool is available to creators building games in the Roblox platform. Players in those games will be able to generate interactive items from text prompts, although the tool is currently limited to two “schemas”: a four-wheeled car which the player can drive, and single-mesh object. A video in the announcement shows this used to generate cars, a plane, and a gun that fires gumballs, via text prompt.
The company said that the tool had been trialled in a game called Wish Master, where players used it to generate over 160,000 objects within six months. The game’s creator, Laksh, said that players using the functionality had “shown a 64% increase in play time in Wish Master on average.”
Anupam Singh, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Roblox, said the company is “actively working on our end vision of an open vocabulary schema system that will allow the creation of any schema” and that Roblox envisions “a future where creators and users will be able to generate any type of 4D object and behavior they want” although did not provide a timeline.
Singh also referred to an internal Roblox research project called “real-time dreaming”, which he said would “enable new types of experiences”. CEO Dave Baszucki demonstrated in a recent social video, showing a crude approximation of a low-framerate Skyrim-esque environment which flicked from a village to a boat at sea in response to text prompts summoning a tsunami.
“The next frontier of creation on Roblox is the continued AI-driven evolution of our creation platform that will allow creators to generate immersive environments, iterate, debug, and collaborate with their teams all through natural language prompts,” said Singh. “If someone can dream it, they should be able to bring it to life.”
So far, the publisher response to the Genie debut and its stock market impact has lead with highlighting their AI adoption although there has been some pushback about what Genie is actually capable of. In response to analyst questions following Take-Two’s latest quarterly results, Take-Two President Karl Slatoff said that Genie was a “very exciting technology” but looked “more like a procedurally generated interactive video” rather than a game engine, and that there were “so many more elements to game development that go beyond ‘world creation.'”
