AS for avatar cloud engine (cloud avatar engine). This is the new advance in artificial intelligence announced by Nvidia during the last Computex fair in May and that Tech&Co was able to test during CES 2024.
The promise: to allow you to freely interact with any secondary non-playable character (NPC) in your game, for fun or to better understand the story.
The graphics card specialist has had a very important AI division for several years. This allows it to develop suitable chips as well as offer working functions with images and videos powered by artificial intelligence to transform 2D elements into 3D, still images into video, etc.
Most important NPCs
Therefore, it was normal for Nvidia to inject generative AI. And this includes video games with ACE. Every game developer who wants can use the platform to create interactive avatars, both in terms of facial expressions from an audio source (Nvidia Audio2Face) and to customize dialogues in different languages based on the player’s interactions (Nvidia Riva Automatic Speech Recognition). Enough to finally give more importance to the secondary characters.
We tried the demo offered by Nvidia. This is a sequence in a ramen restaurant worthy of Cyberpunk 2077. Jin, the owner of the place, is near the kitchen while Nova, a customer, is sitting at the bar.
It is then possible, by pressing the T key on the keyboard, to speak into a microphone with one of the characters. After a few seconds while the AI thinks about its response, the NPC (non-playable character) in front of us begins to answer our questions, even the most eccentric ones that have little to do with the plot of the story.
We had fun with the very serious and cold answers from Nova (even when we asked her why she chose to wear yellow), with a touch of humor and irony from Jin, able to tell us that we are super nice, like loyal Customers when He is asked how he finds us. Facial expressions match the answers, with questioning eyebrows if they find our question unusual or a much stern look if our question is mistimed.
A surprising effect
This is also the strong point of Nvidia’s proposal: each character in the story has an informed personality, a backgroundand a role to play in the main plot of the game. This will determine the tone of the responses to the player, but, according to the Nvidia teams, it could also make developers want to make their world more dynamic by increasing potential interactions.
We voluntarily chose to ask questions that were sometimes unconventional and unrelated to the story we had been told in the preamble of the test to see if the NPCs managed to follow the promised line of the AI. Good news, we were able to do it in both English and French. And even better: the NPC knows how to adapt to the language in which we speak to him, switching from one to another without blinking.
You have to admit that the first technological impression is quite impressive. In an era in which video games are increasingly richer, where a title like GTAVI It seems to promise a world full of secondary characters, we tell ourselves that the video game will take a giant step in its storytelling with so much innovation. NPCs will be able to gain some recognition from players by not only being confined to the background, but also being able to become random actors in the overall plot.
To do this, developers will need to give them some established personality or provide narrative appeal, information to distill or carry essential elements, etc. It can offer developers a whole new aspect of game creation and a new, more exciting life for NPCs.
Ubisoft and Tencent among the first partners
Among Nvidia ACE’s first partners is Ubisoft (Assassin’s Creed), Chinese video game giant Tencent, miHoYo (Genshin Impact), or mobile games specialist NetEase Games. All this should therefore soon offer a much more muscular background in your games.
Ubisoft had already ventured there a little with its game See legion dogs which promised to transform each crossover character into a potential protagonist according to the player’s wishes. But this was limited to a selection of pre-established profiles that acquired physical appearance at random. The French publisher has never hidden its interest in AI, whether in the design of virtual worlds, in writing dialogue or in the movements of its NPCs.
Between the power of the cloud, Nvidia’s visual technologies (DLSS and RTX at the helm) and now the contribution of AI, the American giant is definitely taking video games into a new visual and creative era, for both players and developers. .
Source: BFM TV
