At Computex 2023, NVIDIA pulled out all the stops when it came to Generative AIs like the one called Avatar Cloud Engine.
As its name suggests, this new technology from the green-branded giant allows players to engage in conversations relatively naturally with non-player characters (NPCs).
AI and NPC: is the circle complete?
Kind of extras in video games, secondary NPCs have always allowed with more or less success to add coherence to a universe. At least when they are correctly programmed, at the risk of giving rise to totally incongruous situations in games like Skyrim Or Cyberpunk 2077 because of absurd behavior managed by “artificial intelligence”.
With the Avatar Cloud Engine technology, NVIDIA therefore intends to push the vice even further in terms of conversing with NPCs, thanks to a generative AI. During his conference, the manufacturer split a demo featuring Jin, in a ramen restaurant with a dystopian atmosphere, all rendered under Unreal Engine 5, and of course reinforced by some ray tracing. The character itself was generated by MetaHuman, Epic Games’ impressive technology.
The idea of Avatar Cloud Engine is therefore to allow you to interact with NPCs using your microphone. Exit therefore the pre-established lines of dialogue, to somehow reinforce the immersive nature of the experience. The technology is still in its infancy, but the concept turns out to be quite intriguing. Avatar Cloud Engine can therefore, as its name suggests, work with the Cloud, but also, you will have seen it coming… locally with NVIDIA hardware.
An AI involving many technologies
Besides MetaHuman and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, this demo was made using many other technologies. These include NVIDIA NeMo, which allows you to create many language models, customize the story of an NPC and establish safeguards against inappropriate conversations.
Then we have Riva, a tool allowing to recognize a spoken dialogue to transcribe it in a text format. Finally, we have Audio2Face, a component of a large whole centered on generative AI dubbed NVIDIA Omniverse, which aims to adapt a character’s facial expressions according to the language spoken.
In any case, it puts a lot of effort into making conversations with NPCs more lively. NVIDIA did not take advantage of the demo to announce known games using Avatar Cloud Engine. We bet that the technology needs to be greatly refined before being put in the hands of (sometimes facetious) players.
Source : NVIDIA
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